Large fires pose risks to a number of important values, including the ecology, property and the lives of incident responders. A relatively unstudied aspect of fire management is the risks to which incident managers are exposed due to organizational and sociopolitical factors that put them in a position of, for example, potential liability or degradation of their image as a leader. This paper ex...

Although the silvicultural use of prescribed fire has been researched for almost 70 years, new advances are still being made. These advaace~ are primarily the result of (1) a better under%andktg of fire as an ecological process and (2) the use of this knowledge to restore declining ecosystems, save threatened and endangered species, enhance natural beauty, and regulate composition and structure...

555 Abstract—The Wildland Fire Assessment System (WFAS) is a component of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service Decision Support Systems (DSS) that support fire potential modeling. Fire potential models for Mississippi and for Eastern fire environments have been developed as part of a National Aeronautic and Space Agency-funded study aimed at demonstrating the utility of NASA asset...

1.0 BACKGROUND By letters dated March 13, 1998, and March 12, 1999, PECO Energy Company (the licensee) submitted a response to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission's (NRC's) Request for Additional Information (RAI) dated November 14, 1997, related to Generic Letter (GL) 92-08, "Thermo-Lag 330-1 Fire Barriers," for Peach Bottom Atomic Power Station (Peach Bottom), Units 2 and 3, and Limerick G...

The location set covering problem continues to be an important and challenging spatial optimization problem. The range of practical planning applications underscores its importance, spanning fire station siting, warning siren positioning, security monitoring and nature reserve design, to name but a few. It is challenging on a number of fronts. First, it can be difficult to solve for medium to l...

The abandonment of land, the high energy load generated and accumulated by vegetation covers, climate change and interface scenarios in Mediterranean forest ecosystems are demanding serious attention to forest fire conditions. This is particularly true when dealing with the budget requirements for undertaking protection programs related to the state of current and future forest landscapes. Base...

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have been used mainly to collect environmental data and send it to a base station. Routing protocols are needed to efficiently direct the information flows to the base station. Since sensor nodes have strict energy constraints, data gathering and communication schemes for WSNs need to be designed for an efficient utilization of the available resources. An emergen...

Wind changes, and particularly wind changes that are associated with dry cold fronts, have profound effects on fire behaviour and fire-fighting operations (e.g. Cheney et al. 2001). Huang and Mills (2006b) (hereafter Part 1) have reported on the first stage of a larger scale project that aims to improve the understanding and prediction of wind changes in Australia. In Part 1 a method of objecti...

This study is motivated by the need for a micro-geographic information system (GIS) to represent and analyze 3D spatial data for the plotting of fire-fighting search and rescue routes within buildings. The GIS uses a 3D geometric network model (GNM) and the Dijkstra algorithm to consider smoke movement during different times of a building fire. Therefore, the route calculation algorithm can avo...