Reassess Fire Fighting Systems, Strategy, Policy and Building Codes

Our current fire resilience infrastructure and strategies are built on a series of assumptions that may no longer hold true. We have interior fire sprinklers designed to suppress single home fires with a deluge of water, but they are poorly designed if many homes burn at once. What happens to the water supply a community needs to fight a wildfire when dozens of homes ignite and trigger their automatic sprinkler response? How rapidly does the water supply lose pressure in such a situation? What does that mean for the risk to firefighters, homes, and whole communities? Little is known about the answers to questions like these. We need to assess the performance of water systems, fire sprinklers, and egress routes in past firestorms, particularly related to building code mandated systems that are designed for residential fires not wildfires and fire storms. Existing systems were designed for the fires of our parents and grandparents generations, and we would design different systems today based on our current and future fire reality. Community scale fire suppression systems could substantially increase our resilience to today's fires. Low volume external mister systems might better protect homes while maintaining water supply system pressures necessary for active fire suppression at the hydrant. We do not know how wildfires behave once they reach and saturate urban and suburban environments with dense architectural fuel loads. Current fire models do not account for urban and suburban fires, so we have little data to go on. There are key gaps in our knowledge that need to be addressed so we can design a whole community, all systems approach to community fire resilience. Smart meters coupled with remote irrigation controls managed by AI systems that rapidly account for current fire conditions could perhaps help fire agencies shut off water to homes beyond rescue that are bleeding water supplies with internal sprinkler systems. The same system could perhaps automatically turn on irrigation systems just ahead of the fire edge to dampen spread and create defensible space for firefighters. These and many other possibilities and questions remain largely unexplored. Targeted research and analysis along these lines could inform data-driven policy and decision making in the uncharted territory we've entered with climate crisis fueled wildfires we face today.

Status: Conceptual

Cost: Medium

Partners:

Permitting: None

Funding Sources: