Abstract
Wildland fires and wildland urban-interface (WUI) fires have become a significant problem in recent years. The mechanisms of home ignition in WUI fires are direct flame contact, thermal radiation, and firebrand attack. Out of these three fire spread factors, firebrands are considered to be a main driving force for rapid fire spread as firebrands can fly far from the fire front and ignite structures. The limited experimental data on firebrand showers limits the ability to design the next generation of communities to resist WUI fires to these types of exposures. The objective of this paper is to summarize, compare, and reconsider the results from previous experiments, to provide new data and insights to prevent home losses from firebrands in WUI fires. Comparison of different combustible materials around homes revealed that wood decking assemblies may be ignited within similar time to mulch under certain conditions.
Highlights
Combustibles around Houses to Wildland fires and wildland urban-interface (WUI) fires have become a significant problem in recent years [1,2,3,4,5]
The focus here is a brief description of experimental conditions as well as the experimental apparatus (the full-scale continuousfeed firebrand generator (FS-CF-FG), a.k.a. the NIST continuous-feed Dragon) which used for all experiments to produce firebrand showers
An attempt was made to summarize the ignition vulnerabilities of various combustibles often seen around houses to firebrand showers
Summary
Combustibles around Houses to Wildland fires and wildland urban-interface (WUI) fires have become a significant problem in recent years [1,2,3,4,5]. California in the US has lost thousands of structures to WUI fires over several decades [5]. These statistics do not even include the recent WUI fires in California during. Estimates place at least 70,000 communities or nearly 46 million structures at risk from WUI fires, which amounts to nearly 120 million people in the USA [5]. From 2019 to 2020, Australia has suffered multiple, month-long bushfires, which resulted in the loss of thousands of structures WUI [6]
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