The Development of A Simple Engineering Calculation Method for Wildfire Scenarios
(2022) In LUTVDG/TVBB VBRM05 20221Division of Fire Safety Engineering
- Abstract
- Emergency planning is required to respond to the increasing wildfire threat. A part of this is to assess a community’s capacity to move to a safe place during wildfires. This can be achieved by calculating the time it takes for a community to evacuate from an at-risk area to a relatively safe place. Simple approaches, such as the commonly used engineering calculation, may provide access to a broader group of practitioners to assess or estimate a community’s evacuation time. However, currently there is no publicly available engineering calculation that considers community characteristics and road network for evacuation during wildfires.
This work presents a first attempt to produce a simple set of engineering calculations to capture the... (More) - Emergency planning is required to respond to the increasing wildfire threat. A part of this is to assess a community’s capacity to move to a safe place during wildfires. This can be achieved by calculating the time it takes for a community to evacuate from an at-risk area to a relatively safe place. Simple approaches, such as the commonly used engineering calculation, may provide access to a broader group of practitioners to assess or estimate a community’s evacuation time. However, currently there is no publicly available engineering calculation that considers community characteristics and road network for evacuation during wildfires.
This work presents a first attempt to produce a simple set of engineering calculations to capture the impact of a wildfire emergency on traffic performance during an evacuation of a community. An existing mathematical traffic model, the Highway Capacity Manual (HCM), was identified and has been improved to represent traffic conditions during wildfire evacuations. Factors assumed to directly impact the traffic performance during evacuations were added to this model to improve the numerical framework representation of wildfire conditions and their impact on traffic movement. The factors were derived from conditions found in the past wildfire evacuations by reviewing previous wildfire evacuation case studies.
The improved model was then applied and compared to an empirical data set from a past wildfire evacuation and showed a better representation than the existing theoretical model. A set of test cases was examined to investigate the impacts of the existing theoretical model improvements on predicted performance. (Less) - Popular Abstract
- This project developed a prototype model to calculate vehicle movement evacuation time during a wildfire.
In a world with an increased wildfire risk, how can an engineering tool help communities to better prepare for an evacuation?
The increasing wildfire risks due to environmental pressures from climate change threaten communities living close to or intermixing with wildland. In the past, wildfire hazards caused a significant loss of life and property to communities across the globe. Communities previously vulnerable to wildfire events are now more exposed. On the other hand, new communities are becoming vulnerable as people move to wildland-urban interface locations - given a social preference for access to nature and work.
... (More) - This project developed a prototype model to calculate vehicle movement evacuation time during a wildfire.
In a world with an increased wildfire risk, how can an engineering tool help communities to better prepare for an evacuation?
The increasing wildfire risks due to environmental pressures from climate change threaten communities living close to or intermixing with wildland. In the past, wildfire hazards caused a significant loss of life and property to communities across the globe. Communities previously vulnerable to wildfire events are now more exposed. On the other hand, new communities are becoming vulnerable as people move to wildland-urban interface locations - given a social preference for access to nature and work.
Wildfire is therefore becoming an increasing problem, requiring community planning and response. To do this, we need simple methods (i.e., engineering tools) to quantify the problem, enabling community planners to assess their community's vulnerability. We need to understand not only wildfire development (its spatiotemporal coverage) but also communities' response to wildfire. One of the most common responses is evacuation. Wildfire evacuations are formed from the interaction between people (and their response) and physical and environmental elements.
How to assess the community's evacuation performance during a wildfire? The assessment can be done by adopting the performance-based design approach in fire engineering for the built environment—by calculating the total evacuation time of a community during wildfire scenarios and then comparing it with the time until the fire front reaches the community. The evacuation time can be obtained through a computer simulation or a simpler approach such as an engineering calculation. An engineering calculation may provide access to a broader group of practitioners, especially those unfamiliar with computer simulations. However, until the study was conducted, there was no publicly available engineering calculation for wildfire scenarios.
This study attempted to address this gap by developing a method to calculate vehicle movement time during wildfire evacuation scenarios. (Less)
Please use this url to cite or link to this publication:
http://lup.lub.lu.se/student-papers/record/9083539
- author
- Jaelani, Muthia Khairunisa LU
- supervisor
-
- Steve Gwynne LU
- organization
- course
- VBRM05 20221
- year
- 2022
- type
- H2 - Master's Degree (Two Years)
- subject
- keywords
- Wildfire, evacuation, WUI fire, evacuation modelling, traffic modelling
- publication/series
- LUTVDG/TVBB
- report number
- 5670
- other publication id
- LUTVDG/TVBB—5670--SE
- language
- English
- id
- 9083539
- date added to LUP
- 2022-06-07 09:29:48
- date last changed
- 2022-06-07 09:29:48
@misc{9083539,
abstract = {{Emergency planning is required to respond to the increasing wildfire threat. A part of this is to assess a community’s capacity to move to a safe place during wildfires. This can be achieved by calculating the time it takes for a community to evacuate from an at-risk area to a relatively safe place. Simple approaches, such as the commonly used engineering calculation, may provide access to a broader group of practitioners to assess or estimate a community’s evacuation time. However, currently there is no publicly available engineering calculation that considers community characteristics and road network for evacuation during wildfires.
This work presents a first attempt to produce a simple set of engineering calculations to capture the impact of a wildfire emergency on traffic performance during an evacuation of a community. An existing mathematical traffic model, the Highway Capacity Manual (HCM), was identified and has been improved to represent traffic conditions during wildfire evacuations. Factors assumed to directly impact the traffic performance during evacuations were added to this model to improve the numerical framework representation of wildfire conditions and their impact on traffic movement. The factors were derived from conditions found in the past wildfire evacuations by reviewing previous wildfire evacuation case studies.
The improved model was then applied and compared to an empirical data set from a past wildfire evacuation and showed a better representation than the existing theoretical model. A set of test cases was examined to investigate the impacts of the existing theoretical model improvements on predicted performance.}},
author = {{Jaelani, Muthia Khairunisa}},
language = {{eng}},
note = {{Student Paper}},
series = {{LUTVDG/TVBB}},
title = {{The Development of A Simple Engineering Calculation Method for Wildfire Scenarios}},
year = {{2022}},
}