Since the beginning of the 1930s research has been directed towards improving the effectiveness of water as a forest fire extinguishing agent. Throughout this time various chemical substances have been added to the water, and this is still the case today. Among these substances are the various types of long-term forest fire retardant, which maintain their ability to alter combustion when the water has been removed by evaporation. In order to provide an account of the current state of development of studies on long-term forest fire retardants, we carried out a bibliographic analysis with special attention to work done after 1976 on the different aspects that influence the final effectiveness of forest fire retardant: quality (programs and evaluation), effectiveness, application and environmental impact on streams and aquatic organisms, vegetation and humans. The scope of this work covers the wide subject of fire retardants and it introduces significant work related to all the aspects of fire retardant use.
This work proposes a new thermal image processing method for computing the rate of spread (ROS) of forest fires. It is based on an application for linear flame fronts that are generated on flat surfaces with known dimensions. In the first step of the method, the correspondence between the points of the thermal image obtained and the real plane is calculated by means of a direct linear transformation (DLT). Subsequently, the position of the flame front is determined by applying a threshold-valuesearching criterion within the temperature matrix of the target surface. The design principles for the implementation of this method in the laboratory are described in depth, as well as the considerations that must be taken into account if the method is to be correctly extrapolated to more complex experimental scenarios, such as prescribed burnings or real forest fire emergencies.
Southern Europe is recurrently being hit by forest fires affecting wildland-urban interface (WUI) areas which, particularly in the last decade, have resulted in tremendous consequences. In the years to come, self-protection of communities will be a first priority over fire suppression, demanding better fire-resistant and resilient WUI scenarios through actions grounded on solid and sound regulations and legislation. As of today, the European Union as a whole, and the Member States in particular, are belatedly articulating new and appropriate regulations and implementing policies for the protection of WUI areas against forest fires. Spain is one of the EU Member States, holding 1.1 million ha of WUI areas (above 4% of the total forested land) and experiencing an average of 12,500 forest fires per year over the past decade. In this paper a review of the state of the art on regulations, codes, plans and recommendations on WUI fire prevention and management in Spain is presented. Shortcomings due to the current lack of building and urban planning standards and technical codes for WUI communities are highlighted. We underline some paramount needs to be covered by scientific research and fire engineering in particular topics. Some of them have received little attention in the literature related to European WUI fires while some others have been almost unexplored, such as planning of low-fuel fringes, design of road networks and accessibility, dimension of water supply networks, study of ignitability and combustibility of residential vegetation, role of construction methods and materials, and the wildland-industrial interface. Outcomes from research activities on such topics should lead to appropriately drive and inform the policy making processes on WUI fire prevention and management in Spain and, by extension, in other Southern European countries under a similar situation.
With the rapid development of industry, the number of pipelines that are proposed or under construction is increasing year by year, connecting different regions of a country and, more and more, different countries. Thus, an accidental loss of containment from a pipeline involves a certain risk, which could imply potential consequences on people, equipment and environment. Therefore, the existence in some places of a large net of pipelines has a clear influence on land-use planning, especially in the ones with intense activities, which usually are the inhabited zones. In this paper, a historical analysis is performed on a sample of 1063 accidents that occurred in onshore pipelines, to illustrate the risk associated to these systems and its significance in land-use planning.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft
a b s t r a c tIn this study we estimate the air leakage distribution of single-family dwellings in Catalonia and use a statistical analysis of an airtightness database for single-family dwellings in France to identify the building characteristics that have the greatest influence on airtightness. The most significant variables are found to be the structure type, the floor area, the age of the building, the number of stories and the insulation type. A multiple linear regression technique is then applied to establish a predictive model for deriving an estimated value of airtightness from these characteristics. To estimate the infiltration airflow, a stochastic simulation of the building characteristics was performed per census tract using real data on the distributions of building variables taken from the census information. The model is then applied to determine the power law coefficient and the airtightness distribution. The predicted flow coefficients are combined with the AIM-2 model and given meteorological conditions to determine the infiltration airflow. Two sets of meteorological conditions are considered: average conditions and extreme conditions for each season.
A variety of remote sensing techniques have been applied to forest fires. However, there is at present no system capable of monitoring an active fire precisely in a totally automated manner. Spaceborne sensors show too coarse spatio-temporal resolutions and all previous studies that extracted fire properties from infrared aerial imagery incorporated manual tasks within the image processing workflow. As a contribution to this topic, this paper presents an algorithm to automatically locate the fuel burning interface of an active wildfire in georeferenced aerial thermal infrared (TIR) imagery. An unsupervised edge detector, built upon the Canny method, was accompanied by the necessary modules for the extraction of line coordinates and the location of the total burned perimeter. The system was validated in different scenarios ranging from laboratory tests to large-scale experimental burns performed under extreme weather conditions. Output accuracy was computed through three common similarity indices and proved acceptable. Computing times were below 1 s per image on average. The produced information was used to measure the temporal evolution of the fire perimeter and automatically generate rate of spread (ROS) fields. Information products were easily exported to standard Geographic Information Systems (GIS), such as GoogleEarth and QGIS. Therefore, this work contributes towards the development of an affordable and totally automated system for operational wildfire surveillance.
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