Geosciences Seminar Monday January 29th
2:30 Coffee, Lobby ERB
3:00 Seminar, Engineering 103
Dr. Phil Dennison, University of Utah
“Improving Wildland Firefighter Safety Using Remote Sensing”
Wildland firefighters are tasked with protecting life, property, and resources, but face high risks of injury and death in the line of duty. To avoid entrapment, one of the most common causes of firefighter fatalities, firefighting crews employ safety zones and evacuation routes. Both safety zones and evacuation routes are proven strategies for ensuring firefighter safety, but currently they are based on rough guidelines and subjective assessment of environmental characteristics. Remote sensing enables automated assessment of potential firefighter safety zones and escape routes, providing a set of quantitative attributes for improving decision making. This talk presents three studies using lidar remote sensing to assess firefighter safety zones and escape routes. Methods for assessing safety zones suitability and a novel experiment for modeling escape routes will be presented, and recommendations for expanding this work to the national scale will be explained.