Environmental impact of fire

Drew Martin,Brian Meacham,Mai Tomida

doi:10.1186/s40038-016-0014-1

Abstract

Fires are adverse events with tangible costs for property and human life. Quantification of the immediate and direct costs of fire provide a metric for understanding the social and economic impact of fire and for assessing progress in fire prevention and protection. In addition to their physical costs, fires have a range of less immediate and obvious adverse consequences on the natural environment. These include air contamination from the fire plume (whose deposition is likely to subsequently include land and water contamination), contamination from water runoff containing toxic products, and other environmental discharges or releases from burned materials. Current efforts to improve the sustainability of buildings focus on increasing energy efficiency and reducing the embodied carbon. This overlooks the fact that a fire event could reduce the overall sustainability of a building through the release of pollutants and the subsequent re-build. Several pieces of work exist on the quantification of the environmental impact of fire, but there is a need to pull this information together and to identify the technical gaps that still exist. This publication pulls together the project aims, discusses the sources reviewed, presents a framework that was postulated for quantifying the environmental impact of fire, describes the gaps in knowledge, and presents a plan forward. The research resulted in a more in-depth appreciation of the environmental impact of fire, data, tools and methods that might be undertaken to analysis the environmental impacts as part of a fire engineering analysis, and highlights areas where future research is needed.

Highlights

Fires are adverse events with tangible costs to property and human life
As part of the effort, a definition of environmental impact assessment was selected to bound the effort, a taxonomy to describe the broad range of environmental impact from fires was developed, a list of toxic products resulting from a fire was compiled, exposure pathways for toxic products associated with the fire and fire suppression were identified, and discussion regarding the quantification of environmental costs of fire is provided
A study done by the Water Resources Council in 1983 developed several approaches which can be used to predict impacts (CRC, 1999): a) Adoption of forecasts made by other agencies or groups b) Use of scenarios based on differing assumptions regarding resources and plans c) Use of expert group judgment via the conduction of formalized Delphi studies or the use of the nominal group process d) Extrapolation approaches based upon the use of trend analysis and simple models of environmental components e) Analogy and comparative analyses which involve the use of look-alike resources and projects and the application of information from such look-alike conditions to the planning effort

Summary

Introduction

Fires are adverse events with tangible costs to property and human life. Quantification of these costs provide a metric for understanding the social and economic impact of fire, which can be useful for assessing and influencing fire prevention and protection. A study done by the Water Resources Council in 1983 developed several approaches which can be used to predict impacts (CRC, 1999): a) Adoption of forecasts made by other agencies or groups b) Use of scenarios based on differing assumptions regarding resources and plans c) Use of expert group judgment via the conduction of formalized Delphi studies or the use of the nominal group process d) Extrapolation approaches based upon the use of trend analysis and simple models of environmental components e) Analogy and comparative analyses which involve the use of look-alike resources and projects and the application of information from such look-alike conditions to the planning effort

Results

Conclusion