Document Type
Journal Article
Publication Title
Fire
Publisher
MDPI
School
School of Engineering / School of Medical and Health Sciences
RAS ID
27705
Abstract
Predicting water suppression requirements and its impacts on firefighting strategies and logistics within the urban environment has been the subject of many previous studies, however the same level of research has yet to be applied in the realm of wildfire suppression. To work towards addressing this knowledge gap, this paper provides guidance for Incident Controllers in relation to critical water flow rates required to extinguish large wildfire across a wide range of forest fuel loads, fire weather and active fire front depths. This is achieved through mathematical empirical analysis of water flow rates required for head fire suppression during 540 simulated wildfires in forest vegetation. This research applies a fire engineering approach to wildfire suppression logistics and deterministically assess the suitability of appliance and aircraft based head fire suppression. The results highlight the limitations of offensive wildfire suppression involving direct head fire attacks by appliances once wildfires attain a quasi-steady state in forest fuels.
DOI
10.3390/fire2010003
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Comments
Penney, G., Habibi, D., Cattani, M., & Carter, M. (2019). Calculation of Critical Water Flow Rates for Wildfire Suppression. Fire, 2(1), 3. Available here