168 – 168 - Risk Analysis and Related Topics
Urbanization and Fire Risk
Patrick Chang
Henry M. Gunn High School
Fires, whether wild or human-caused, are destructive and fairly common. A main method of damage mitigation comes from halting the spread of fires, affected by factors such as fire fuel availability, human intervention, and the land condition. People are capable of altering all of those factors, most effectively with urbanization and land development. By understanding the relationship between urbanization and fire risk, city planning can be altered to optimally prevent fire spread. Since fire frequency is strongly attributed to erratic factors including human activity and lightning, fire risk is defined as the probability of the spread in the area of a fire in this study. Urbanization includes many factors which influence fire risk, such as building concentration and infrastructure including roads and fire stations. By using historical land usage maps—generally from censuses—to separate regions to specific levels of urbanization and finding the areas of fires within those regions, regression methods including Neural Networks are used to search for correlation between urbanization and fire risk.