WUI Inspection and why it’s very important

WUI (Wildland Urban Interface)

The wildland urban interface is an area where human made structures and infrastructure (e.g., cell towers, schools, water supply facilities, etc.) are in or adjacent to areas prone to the wildfire.

WUI in the United States grew rapidly from 1990 to 2010 in terms of both number of new houses (from 30.8 to 43.4 million; 41% growth) and land area (from 581,000 to 770,000 km2; 33% growth), making it the fastest-growing land use type in the conterminous United States. The vast majority of new WUI areas were the result of new housing (97%), not related to an increase in wildland vegetation.

At Risk Community

An “at risk community” is defined as a community within the wildland urban interface listed in the Federal Register notice, “Wildland Urban Interface Communities within the Vicinity of Federal Lands that are at High Risk from Wildfire”. OR A group of home and other structures with basic infrastructure and services within or adjacent to federal land is defined as an “at risk community”. “At risk communities” are areas where conditions are conducive to a large scale wildland fire disturbance event, thereby posing a significant threat to human life or property.

WUI Inspection Process

Each year the Fire Department will be conducting wildland urban interface inspections and education based on the rated fire hazard severity zone determined. The focus will be on compliance with the Modification Standards and Requirements as well as education for homeowners on steps to mitigate the effects of a wildfire.

Inspection Process Flow

Problems With The Manual Inspection Process

Following are some of the problems with the current inspection process

1. Identifying Property Information like owner and contact information
2. Determining Property Perimeter or the boundary
3. Manually noting down the violations
4. Manually generating notice and sending to property owners

Due to whole manual process, it becomes very difficult to complete the process within the brush cycle period and its very critical for the city to complete this process

Available Tools and Softwares

Some of the tools which can make this process simple and easy for the department to complete

1. ESRI ARCGis Maps: ESRI Provides many tools and softwares by using many cities have developed some tools to solve above mentions problems. Link: https://www.esri.com/en-us/arcgis/about-arcgis/overview
2. 3Di Prevent Solution: 3Di Systems come up with a solution to solve all above problems and they have developed tool specifically for performing WUI Inspection.

Link: https://www.3disystems.com/fire-prevention/

Role of Artificial Intelligence

Researches created a data model which can predict wild fires, to train the deep learning model, the researchers used three years of data for 239 sites across the American west starting in 2015, when SAR data from the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-1 satellites became available. As noted by Futurity, they leveraged field data from the National Fuel Moisture Database and used it to estimate fuel moisture from two types of measurements collected by space-borne sensors. As the one involves measurements of visible light bouncing off Earth, the other, known as synthetic aperture radar (SAR), measures the return of microwave radar signals, which can infiltrate through leafy branches to the ground surface.

Alexandra Konings, an assistant professor of earth system science at Stanford University said that one of their big breakthroughs was to look at a newer set of satellites that are using much longer wavelengths, and allows the observations to be sensitive to water much deeper into the forest canopy and be directly representative of the fuel moisture content.

Conclusion

With the rise in WUI area and due to global warming risk of WUI fires increasing day by day, with proper inspections and guidelines cities around the world can definitely minimise the casualties.