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European Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operations
Project

Wildland-Urban Interface VIrtual Essays Workbench (WUIVIEW)

Area of activity / Keywords:

Wildland-Urban Interface fires, climate change adaptation, fire risk reduction strategies, awareness raising, structures survivability, sheltering

Summary of the action:

Europe has many areas in which forest fires seriously affect urban and rural communities, the so-called Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI). Climate change is dramatically worsening the WUI fire problem throughout Europe by i) exacerbating highly intense wildfires (firestorms) in Mediterranean countries and ii) causing emergent WUI-fire prone zones in northern latitudes not adapted to wildfires. The WUIVIEW project aims at reinforcing WUI fires risk reduction strategies by designing, testing and operating a virtual workbench service for the analysis of fire hazards and buildings vulnerabilities at different European WUI realities. WUIVIEW will become a powerful and innovative platform to perform essays and simulation studies dealing with structures survivability and sheltering capability. To set up our workbench, fire hazard of natural and artificial fuels will be characterized by real fire experiments and modelling. Special focus will be devoted to ornamental highly-flammable vegetation and gas infrastructures typically present at the WUI plot-scale. We will rely on a well-established fire protection engineering methodology (Performance-Based Design, PBD), which is based on cutting-edge fire simulations techniques, to get insights on the response to fire of typical building systems and materials. We will take advantage of lessons learned from past DG-ECHO project WUIWATCH to configure an inventory of pattern scenarios to be explored. We will showcase WUIVIEW methods and findings by analysing two real WUI settlements in Madrid and Sweden. The WUIVIEW workbench operation will help residents and fire risk managers to assess vulnerability in WUI communities, will assist engineers and architects in their designs and will provide scientifically-based information to fire services and regulatory bodies. The sustainability of the project is envisaged at the end of the Action through exploiting a consultancy service to manage WUI fire risk in vulnerable communities.

Beneficiary

UNIVERSITAT POLITECNICA DE CATALUNYA
CALLE JORDI GIRONA 31, PO box 000, 08034 , BARCELONA (ES)
www.upc.edu

Project coordinators

ASSOCIACAO PARA O DESENVOLVIMENTO DA AERODINAMICA INDUSTRIAL - (PT)

FUNDACIO D'ECOLOGIA DEL FOC I GESTIO D'INCENDIS PAU COSTA ALCUBIERRE - (ES)

ASSOCIATION POUR LA RECHERCHE ET LE DEVELOPPEMENT DES METHODES ET PROCESSUS INDUSTRIELS - (FR)

ALMA MATER STUDIORUM - UNIVERSITA DI BOLOGNA - (IT)

RISE RESEARCH INSTITUTES OF SWEDEN AB - (SE)

Presentation at the kick off meeting