TITLE:
Wildfire Occurrence: Integrated Model for Risk Analysis and Operative Suppression Aspects Management
AUTHORS:
Laura Bonora, Claudio Claudio Conese, Enrico Marchi, Enrico Tesi, Niccolò Brachetti Montorselli
KEYWORDS:
Wild-Land Fire; Ignition Risk; Infrastructural Risk; Meteorological Risk
JOURNAL NAME:
American Journal of Plant Sciences,
Vol.4 No.3A,
March
29,
2013
ABSTRACT:
Generally forest fires are related to human activities and need an
effective fire prevention and suppression organization, based on a deep
knowledge of the territory, fire behaviour and suppression system resources
network. To organise monitoring, prevention and fire fighting operations, the
knowledge of the risk level for different areas is important. To evaluate the
probability that a forest fire occurs and to organise prevention and management
of fire fighting activities, both simple and easy-to-use risk and operational
difficulty indices were implemented. CNR-IBIMET
and DISTAF Dept., on commitment of Tuscany Region, developed a multistep
process for the evaluation of the risk, that can be used to assess land
planning and to organise seasonal fire fighting resources. This model is called
Final Risk Index (FRI); it is the result of the
combination of the following two indices, which are initially developed
separately. The concerned indices are the Global Risk Index (GRI), and
Operational Difficulty Index in Fire Fighting (ODIF). The fire risk index
processes different parameters to generate two hazards: static and dynamic,
merged to obtain the Global Risk Index (GRI). It
is very helpful to estimate the probability of forest fire occurrence, but it
does not provide information on forest fire extinction difficulties. The
operational difficulty index in fire fighting (ODIF) resumes all the factors affecting
fire fighting activity by air and by ground and suggests the extinction
efficiency of forest fires in a given area. Thus FRI improves aspects of the
fire prevention planning, focused to the needs of a public operative structure.
The objective was modelling the links between the main components in ignition
and fire fighting actions to produce an easy to use tool to face the
emergences, also foreseeing forest fires regime changes in the coming decades.