Three thousand miles from the firestorms ravaging southern California, scientists in Massachusetts are lighting their own fires, in an ongoing effort to get ready for the next disaster.
Worcester Polytechnic Institute is home to one of the nation’s leading research centers devoted to fires — how they start, how they burn and how to snuff them out. In 2023, the university teamed up with the National Science Foundation and San Jose State University to create a center for wildfire research.
“The whole purpose of the center is to study the science behind forest fires,” said Ali Rangwala, a professor of fire protection engineering at WPI. And despite millennia of experience, humans still know far too little about what happens when forests burn.
On Thursday, WPI doctoral candidate Fernando Ebensperger ignited samples of Ponderosa pine branches, the same kind of material going up in smoke on the West Coast. But this is a controlled burn, conducted inside a wind tunnel that pushes air past the burning material at up to 40 miles an hour.
Downrange from the burning pine, a high-resolution digital camera captures the tiny sparks and embers generated by the fire. A medical algorithm originally created to spot tumors has been repurposed to scan the video. The algorithm counts the bits of scorched material blowing past the camera.
Ebesperger said his research will reveal how many hot embers are released and how big they are. He’s already conducted similar research with burning pieces of Douglas fir trees. He’s building up a database to help fire officials understand how far these embers can travel and what kinds of man-made building materials they could ignite.
It’s vital information at a time when growing numbers of humans move into “wildland-urban interfaces,” the regions where people are in close proximity to undeveloped land. One 2018 research paper found that 43 percent of all homes built in the US between 1990 and 2010 were built in these regions, and that 25 million residents moved in.
The important thing, said Albert Simeoni, head of WPI’s fire protection engineering department, is to design wildland-urban interfaces that keep fires from breaking out, or prevent them from getting too big. “There is no silver bullet,” said Simeoni a veteran firefighter in his native France. “There is not a single solution.”
So he and his colleagues are working with federal, state and local officials on an array of ideas to limit the risk of wildfires. These include more stringent building codes for fire-resistant housing and larger buffer zones around buildings to limit the spread of fires.
Simeoni also said he’s working with the National Institute of Standards and Technology on developing refuge areas in likely fire zones. These would be places where people can find safety from a wildfire when escape routes are blocked by flames or gridlocked traffic. The concept took on new urgency after the 2018 Camp fire in California, where many of the 85 people who died were trapped inside the fire zone.
California officials have come under fire for lacking sufficient reserves of water to fight the fires. But Simeoni said that once a wildfire gets out of control, a shortage of water is almost beside the point.
“You can throw all the water you want,” said Simeoni. “After a certain size of the fire, during big wind events like that, there is very little they can do,”
So Simeoni and his WPI colleagues are focused on the next wildfire disaster. ”When I was a firefighter in France we used to say, when we fight the fires, the battle is already lost.”
Hiawatha Bray can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him @GlobeTechLab.
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