Orange, smoke filled skies. Raining embers. Burning homes. All of these elements paint the picture of destruction of nearly 62 square miles (about twice the area of Manhattan) of Los Angeles, California. Around 12,000 buildings and homes were destroyed, and 24 people killed as fires swept through entire neighborhoods. While not one of the largest fires in California’s history, it will be the most expensive for not only the state but also the nation. Rough estimates place damages and economic loss at $250 billion.
Over the past year, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been working with the University of Illinois’ Critical Infrastructure Resilience Institute (CIRI) to develop technologies and tools that could dramatically improve planning and preparation for wildfires and lead to more effective fire response and containment efforts in the near future.
As a DHS Center of Excellence, CIRI has been addressing its mission of improving the security and resilience of our nation’s infrastructure since 2015 – delivering impactful research and technology solutions to urgent challenges facing critical infrastructure owners and operators and government entities at the federal, state, local, territorial and tribal levels.
A team of researchers led by Dr. Paolo Gardoni, Professor of Civil Engineering at the Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, are researching the characteristics of wildfires and developing a tool that can predict the path of a future potential wildfire based on input characteristics such as topography, vegetation, wind direction and speed, and other factors. Based on this projected burn pattern, decision-makers and stakeholders can identify potential risks to buildings and other infrastructure that could be impacted by the wildfire and to then make informed decisions regarding remedial actions that can be taken ahead of time to reduce that risk.
Additionally, once a wildfire has ignited, responders can use the same tool to project its path in real time and to make more effective, informed decisions on interventions to control and ultimately extinguish the fire and thus to reduce its impact to life and property.
Additional work on the project is ongoing. To date the research team has developed the underlying prediction model and has tested it against known, previous wildfires and has demonstrated exceptional correlation between the model’s prediction of the wildfire’s spread against the known behavior of the historical wildfire. “These testing results offer confidence that the tool – once delivered to the field – will significantly improve the planning and response to future wildfires and reduce their destructive impact,” said Dr. Gardoni. The research team is projecting to release an early version of the tool to partners and collaborators for functional and usability testing in early summer 2025. Feedback from that testing will then be incorporated into an initial public release at a later date.
CIRI Director, Dr. David Nicol, added, “Tragically, the CIRI wildfires tool was not available to address the Los Angeles fires. We cannot eliminate the threat of wildfires. However, the foresight of DHS to sponsor and fund this research will pay significant dividends as we battle wildfires in the future.”