WUIVIEW

Overview

Description

The WUIVIEW project aims at reinforcing wildland-urban interface (WUI) fire risk reduction strategies by designing, testing and operating a virtual workbench service to analyse fire hazards and building vulnerabilities.

WUIVIEW is an innovative platform that can be used to generate essays and carry out simulation studies dealing with structures’ survivability and sheltering capabilities.

Europe has many areas in which forest fires seriously affect urban and rural communities, the so-called WUI. Climate change is dramatically worsening the WUI fire problem throughout Europe by i) exacerbating highly intense wildfires (firestorms) in Mediterranean countries and ii) causing WUI-fire prone zones that are not adapted to wildfires.

To set up a workbench, fire hazards of natural and artificial fuels will be characterised by real fire experiments and modelling. A special focus will be on highly flammable vegetation and gas infrastructure. The project relies on a well-established fire protection engineering methodology, which is based on cutting-edge fire simulation techniques, to get insights on how typical building systems and materials respond to fire.

WUIVIEW will help residents and fire risk managers to assess vulnerability in WUI communities, will assist engineers and architects in their designs, and will provide scientific information to fire services and regulatory bodies.

The WUIVIEW Project has prepared a Wildfire Vulnerability Assessment Tool, which has been published in June 2023, in the International Journal of Wildland Fire. 

For more details and reports delivered by the project, please check here.

Partner organisations