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Understanding Fire Spread in Wildland-Urban Interface Communities Szasdi Bardales, Fernando; 0000-0002-9643-5919 Elhami-Khorasani, Negar Civil, Structural and Environmental Engineering civil engineering engineering M.S. More than 70,000 U.S. communities, containing 46 million homes, are at risk of wildfires, yet only about 7,000 communities have adopted protection measures. The wildland urban interface (WUI) is defined as a geographic area where human developments and flammable vegetation merge in a wildfire-prone environment. The losses due to wildfire in WUI have been rising in the past decade; which could be attributed to changes in climate, resulting changes in vegetation growth and fuel availability, and increased land developments in the WUI. The majority of the wildfires ranked among the most destructive in California have taken place in recent years. While the number of households at risk is rising and the population living in the WUI increases, there is no indication that this problem will recede in the near future. The layout of communities and the characteristics of building construction play an important role on how the fire spreads within a community. However, existing research on wildfires has focused on fire progression within the wildland, with no well-established model to study fire spread within a WUI community. The existing fire spread models at the community level have been developed for post-earthquake fire scenarios for an urban environment involving equally spaced and equally-sized square buildings in a dense urban area, which is not necessarily the urban environment in a WUI community. Accurate physics-based models are thus needed to investigate the process of fire spread in a WUI community. Once physics-based models are established, vulnerabilities in a community can be identified, effective defensive actions can be recommended, and more efficient firefighting response strategies can be planned during a fire event. 2019-07-26T18:27:36Z 2019-07-26T18:27:36Z 2019 2019-05-10 18:40:04 Text Thesis http://hdl.handle.net/10477/79812 eng Users of works found in University at Buffalo Institutional Repository (UBIR) are responsible for identifying and contacting the copyright owner for permission to reuse. University at Buffalo Libraries do not manage rights for copyright-protected works and cannot assist with permissions. Copyright retained by author. application/pdf State University of New York at Buffalo