FEATURED WHITE PAPER

City Scale Wildfire Loss and Relative Fire Speed: A Framework for Meaningful Community-Scale Risk Reduction
Authors: Scott Farley, Head of Research and Development at XyloPlan and Dave Winnacker, Fire Chief (Ret.)

Analysis of recent disaster fires shows that five ingredients are necessary for a fire to turn from a wildfire into an urban disaster with city-scale losses: sustained strong winds, rapid fire spread through vegetation, structures that lack defensible space and home hardening, delayed or overtaxed firefighting response, and tightly-spaced and contiguous structural fuels. We argue that considering time as the key common denominator of the problem of urban disaster fires provides a useful framework to evaluate how to design policies, programs, and optimization strategies to prevent future widespread losses.

Read the full white paper here.