Is evacuation of a community during a wildfire largely different from evacuation of a building? How much of the knowledge from the building fires is directly useful in planning and managing such an event, and what stuff is completely different? These are the lead questions for my today's interview with prof. Enrico Ronchi from Lund University and dr Max Kinateder from National Research Council Canada.

Both guests currently research the evacuation layer of the WUI problem – starting with the response of the endangered people, through choice of the mode of the transport, to solving the transportation models of such evacuations. A multilayered, multifaceted and interdisciplinary challenge, but one we need to have a good understanding of if we want to deliver good risk based, knowledge informed guidance for communities at risk.

In this episode, we got through their research pinpointing the difference between the building and a community evacuation. We touch the methods of research that are currently in used, and what kind of models they can inform. Finally, we get to talk about their recent experimental study during a fire drill in Roxborough Park, Colorado. This has literally happened a few days ago, and we can already discuss the challenges, and the first ‘anecdotal’ findings of the study.

Becoming open to the WUI problem and learning the challenges that are in front of us in this regard is critical to fire safety engineering, especially at the time when we observe Wildfire Safety Engineering becoming more of a real thing! I foresee that in future, a lot of us will work in the wildfire prevention / mitigation/contingency space, and I hope you will appreciate the fact you’ve learned it first from the Fire Science Show!

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