Negar Elhami-Khorasani, Associate Professor in the University of Buffalo’s Department of Civil, Structural & Environmental Engineering will present “Assessing Wildfire Risk: Simulating Fire Behavior in Wildland-urban Interface Communities” as part of the CaSE seminar series.
Abstract
Destructive wildfires now pose a significant threat across various regions nationwide and beyond what was once considered the fire season, examples of which are the 2016 Gatlinburg Fire in the Southeast and the 2021 Marshall Fire in late December. Current wildfire risk assessment procedures typically use simulation models to quantify wildfire exposure in wildland-urban interface (WUI) communities but often rely on subjective estimates of the susceptibility of structures to fire to quantify the risk. Thus, there is a critical need to improve the understanding and characterization of the vulnerabilities and to assess the effectiveness of different mitigation measures related to individual building features and community layouts on the fire resilience of a WUI community. This presentation introduces a model to simulate fire spread inside WUI communities, enabling quantification of structural damage. Two case studies, the 2021 Marshall Fire and the 2023 Lahaina Fire are modeled to study the community damage patterns. The application of the model to inform the development of mitigation guidelines and to enhance preparedness and response strategies for WUI communities are discussed.
Bio
Negar Elhami-Khorasani is an Associate Professor in the Department of Civil, Structural and Environmental Engineering at the University at Buffalo. Her research focuses on the performance-based design of structures at high temperatures, resilience of communities under extreme hazards including wildfires and earthquakes, and characterization of multi-hazard events and their effects on structures and communities. She previously served as co-chair of the ASCE/SEI Fire Protection Committee and is currently co-chair of the SEAoNY Resilience Committee, as well as a member of the Board of Directors of the Applied Technology Council. She is an associate editor of Fire Technology and an editorial board member of Reliability Engineering and System Safety. She has received the AISC Early Career Faculty Award and the Fire Protection Research Foundation Medal.