Analysis of recent disaster fires shows that five ingredients are necessary for a fire to turn from a wildfire into an urban disaster with city-scale losses: sustained strong winds, rapid fire spread through vegetation, structures that lack defensible space and home hardening, delayed or overtaxed firefighting response, and tightly-spaced and contiguous structural fuels. We argue that considering time as the key common denominator of the problem of urban disaster fires provides a useful framework to evaluate how to design policies, programs, and optimization strategies to prevent future widespread losses. Maximum risk reduction is achieved when activities alter the relative timing of key phases of the incident lifecycle. Because wildfire mitigation resources are limited, leveraging multiple forms of risk reduction activities and network effects can achieve critical changes in relative timing with high return on investment.
See a full white paper on this topic by Scott Farley, Head of Research and Development at XyloPlan and Dave Winnacker, Fire Chief (ret):
City Scale Wildfire Loss and Relative Fire Speed: A Framework for Meaningful Community-Scale Risk Reduction
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