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Towers and poles supporting power transmission and telecommunication lines have collapsed due to heating from wildland fires. Such occurrences have led to interruptions in power or communication in large municipal areas with associated social and political implications as well as increased immediate danger to humans. Vegetation clearance standards for overhead conductors in the US have been specified to prevent ignition due to arcing from the power line to ground or to minimize potential fire ignition by hot sparks from a line fault that fall into vegetation on the ground. The California...

Large wildland fires in conifer forests typically involve some degree of crowning, with their initiation and propagation dependent upon several characteristics of the canopy fuels. Recent outbreaks of mountain pine beetle (Dendroctonus ponderosae Hopkins) in lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta Dougl. var. latifolia E ngelm.) forests and spruce beetle (Dendroctonus rufipennis Kirby) in Engelmann spruce (Picea engelmannii Parry ex Engelm.) forests have affected vast areas across western and northern North America, which have subsequently produced forests containing relatively large amounts of...

Systems to estimate forest fire potential commonly utilize one or more indexes that relate to expected fire behavior; however they indicate neither the chance that a large fire will occur, nor the expected number of large fires. That is, they do not quantify the probabilistic nature of fire danger. In this work we use large fire occurrence information from the Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity project, and satellite and surface observations of fuel conditions in the form of the Fire Potential Index, to estimate two aspects of fire danger: 1) the probability that a 1 acre ignition will...

The Predictive Services program was created under the National Wildfire Coordinating Group in 2001 to address the need for long- and short-term decision support information for fire managers and operations personnel. The primary mission of Predictive Services is to integrate fire weather, fire danger, and resource availability to enable strategic fire suppression resource allocation and prioritization. Each Geographic Coordination Area (GCA) is comprised of individual forecast zones called Predictive Service Areas (PSAs). In 2006, Predictive Services began production of the 7-Day Significan...

Fuel classifications are integral tools in fire management and planning because they are used as inputs to fire behavior and effects simulation models. Fuel Loading Models (FLMs) and Fuel Characteristic Classification System (FCCSs) fuelbeds are the most popular classifications used throughout wildland fire science and management, but they have yet to be thoroughly evaluated with field data. In this study, we used a large dataset of Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) surface fuel estimates (n = 13,138) to create a new fuel classification called Fuel Type Groups (FTGs) from FIA forest type...

Currently, the Chilean insurance market sells forest fire insurance policies and agricultural weather risk policies. However, access to forest fire insurance is difficult for small and medium enterprises (SMEs), with a significant proportion (close to 50%) of forest plantations being without coverage. Indeed, the insurance market that sells forest fire insurance policies does not have an evaluation system based on known standards accepted by the market; rather, it is discretionary, with each company evaluating risk with their own specific parameters. This lack of standardization reduces...

The tragic fatality events of the mid-1990s and subsequent studies led to a concentrated effort to increase safety in the US federal wildland firefighter community beginning in 2000. Addressing human factors (HF) as a causal agent in accidents was a major focal point for this cultural change. To examine the effectiveness of this change, we hypothesized a decline in firefighter entrapment rates after implementation. Seasonal data on entrapment numbers and exposure amounts were collected on a national level for federal and non-federal wildland firefighting agencies for the years 1994-2013....

The Strategic Operational Planner (SOPL) wildland fire management position was created in the United States in 2009 to reflect updated terminology. SOPL merges the former Fire Use Manager positions (FUM1 and FUM2) and is now an established position within the Incident Command System. Traditionally, the FUM positions and the SOPL have been used on incidents managed for resource benefit, wildland fire use, and on long-duration events. The use of the SOPL to develop a strategic operational plan on "suppression" strategy wildfires is fairly new, thus, creating some confusion about the position'...

In many areas of the United States, prescribed burning near highways is considered too risky because of the potential for smoke to obscure the highway. In one area in Florida, prescribed fire is used to reduce the risks of smoke related impacts to Interstate 95. The St Johns River Water Management District manages over 400,000 acres of land. Seventy percent of those lands are wetlands, and nearly 200,000 acres of the wetlands are marsh ecosystems that require fire for their perpetuation. Some marsh acres are immediately adjacent to Interstate 95 near Cocoa, in Brevard County, Florida....

Within the last decade, mixed-severity fire regimes (MSFRs) have gained increasing attention in both the scientific and management communities (Arno and others 2000, Baker and others 2007, Hessburg and others 2007, Perry and others 2011, Halofsky and others 2011, Stine and others 2014). The growing influence of the MSFR model derives from several factors including: (1) recent recognition of the wide geographic breadth of mixed severity fire regimes within western North America and elsewhere, (2) a lack of basic ecological data that spans sufficient temporal and spatial scales to sufficientl...