Citation

Wybo JL, Guarnieri F, Richard B. Safety Sci. 1995; 20(1): 61-70.

Copyright

(Copyright © 1995, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Forest fire danger is one of the main emergencies in many countries all over the world. To reduce the consequences, forest managers or fire officers use prevention, by reducing biomass, by locating fighting teams in exposed areas or by patrolling. To fight fire efficiently, they use suitable means: trucks, planes, helicopters, fire retardants. The keypoint of prevention and fighting is the assessment of danger, which can be done from different points of view and at different time scales: from historical data, by real time monitoring or by forecasting. A survey of operational danger rating methods shows two approaches: assessment of a global index, integrating several aspects of forest fires, or assessment of a set of indexes representing individually the key factors.This paper describes a combination of assessment methods, integrated in a decision support system. Four methods are used, related to fire occurrence, assessing the frequency of fires from historical data, inflammability of dead fuels and live fuels, traducing the behaviour after ignition and fire severity, evaluating the difficulty of fighting. The integration of these methods is done using a knowledge-based approach in association with a relational database and a GIS.