Citation

Penney G, Baker G, Valencia A, Gorham D. Fire (Basel) 2022; 5(2): e54.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2022, MDPI: Multidisciplinary Digital Publications Institute)

DOI

10.3390/fire5020054

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

The hazard posed by wildland-urban-interface (WUI) fires is recognized by the international fire research community and features as one of nine research need priority threads in the Society of Fire Protection Engineers (SFPE) Research Roadmap. We posit that the first step in the journey to enhancing fire safety engineering at the WUI is to develop a common understanding between developers, engineers, planners, and regulators of the development scope, wildfire problem, technical design solutions, and verification methods to be used. In order to define a fire safety engineering consultation process appropriate for the wildfire context, this paper aims to translate well-established and evidence-based performance-based design (PBD) consultation frameworks and approaches from traditional fire safety engineering to the wildfire context. First, we review international English-language fire safety engineering frameworks that have been developed for the urban context. Next, we distil the results into a streamlined framework, which we call the "CAED Framework". Finally, we apply and discuss the contextualization of the CAED Framework to the WUI context through a comparative case study of urban and WUI development. In doing so we seek to provide a structure for the development of standardized PBD within the WUI context across jurisdictions internationally, as well as to embed best practices into the emerging field of performance-based wildfire engineering.

Language: en

Keywords

fire safety; fire safety engineering; PBD; performance-based design; wildfire; WUI