Abstract
Community Risk Assessment: GIS-Based Model for Wildfire Prediction & Mitigation
Track: Emergency Medical Services/Fire
Author(s): Ahmed Abukhater
Wildfire is a disastrous force of gargantuan proportion, responsible for significant forest and property loss. Wildfire hazards are one of the most notoriously destructive and devastating natural hazards in the United States. The high cost and severe damage that forest fires cause is blamed, in part, on the difficulty in predicting and responding to fire in a timely manner. To that end, predicting fire hazards and modeling areas that are most vulnerable to fire is both important and warranted to mitigate wildfire hazards and associated costs and fatalities. Intensifying and improving emergency response in areas most susceptible to the frequency of fire occurrence, based on data interpolation and prior delineation of these areas, can help save lives and precious resources. Cognizant of the importance of forest-urban interface fire predication and mitigation, this paper proposes a GIS-based multiple-criteria evaluation (MCE) framework for analyzing, predicting, and ultimately mitigating wildfires.
Ahmed Abukhater
University of Texas at Austin
8225 N FM 620 APT 636
Austin , Texas 78726
United States
Phone: 512-420-2624
E-mail: abukhater@mail.utexas.edu