Fire hazards at the wildland urban interface: A perspective from the wuiview project

Wildland Urban Interface (WUI) fires are posing tremendous management challenges in terms of civil protection and fire mitigation. Many critical factors are contributing and increasing the risk at the WUI, such as the presence of all sorts of fuels whose hazard is poorly characterized and disregarded by residents, the existence of vulnerable elements in houses and industrial installations and the absence of standards that deal with the WUI problem at the homeowner/property scale. The WUIVIEW project aims at developing an innovative risk management tool that will help WUI communities to adapt in order to face the new generation of forest fires. This is being done by designing, setting up and testing a virtual workbench service for the performance-based analysis of fire environments in the surroundings of buildings at the WUI. In this framework, a methodological approach for the assessment of LPG domestic tanks vulnerability under fire exposure at the WUI has been developed. The present work provides a demonstration of such methodology through a realistic case study, together with an overview of the WUIVIEW project activities.