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Toward Probabilistic Risk Assessment of Wildland–Urban Interface Communities for Wildfires

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Abstract

The number of wildfire incidents affecting communities in Wildland–Urban Interface (WUI) areas has been rapidly increasing. Understanding the fire spread between structures and evaluation of the response of the communities to the possible wildfire scenarios are crucial for proper risk management in the existing and future communities. This paper discusses a stochastic methodology to evaluate the community’s response to potential wildfire scenarios. The methodology has three primary features: (1) it is based on stochastic modeling of fire spread; (2) it breaks the wildfire incident into two consecutive segments: spread inside the wildland and spread inside the community; (3) it integrates the two spread models in the form of a conditional probability. The paper focuses on fire spread inside the community and applies the proposed methodology to two case studies in California, US. The two case studies demonstrate variations in fire spread within the communities for the given fire scenarios approaching from the wildland. The performance of communities is characterized using cumulative distribution functions of the number of ignited buildings over time.

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Acknowledgements

This study was partially funded by the State University of New York (SUNY) Research Seed Grant Program. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of the sponsor.

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  1. Department of Civil, Structural and Environmental Engineering, University at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY, USA

    Nima Masoudvaziri, Negar Elhami-Khorasani & Kang Sun

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  1. Nima Masoudvaziri
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Correspondence to Nima Masoudvaziri.

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Masoudvaziri, N., Elhami-Khorasani, N. & Sun, K. Toward Probabilistic Risk Assessment of Wildland–Urban Interface Communities for Wildfires. Fire Technol 59, 1379–1403 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10694-023-01382-y

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