Fires in porous media: natural and urban canopies

Abstract

Uncontrolled fires and their associated smoke have been part of mankind’s hazard environment since prehistoric times. Fires caused by lightening or volcanic activity moved across the earliest vegetative landscape whether grassland or forest scourging away all life before its path. Later, as man collected into groups and tribes, villages, towns and cities were routinely wiped away as natural, accidental, war or arson sources provided ignition. Most cities were not burned to the ground once, but multiple times. Even today massive wild fires in forests occur every year all over the world, and the threat of mass fires in cities haunt the minds of those concerned by large petrochemical accidents, wars or terrorism.