You’re a hotshot working to contain a wildfire. The conflagration jumps the fire line, forcing your crew to flee using pre-determined escape routes. At the start of the day, the crew boss estimated how long it should take to get to the wildfire safety zone. With the flames at your back, you check your watch and hope they were right.
From an article by the University of Utah by Lisa Potter.
Firefighters mostly rely on life-long experience and ground-level information to choose evacuation routes, with little support from digital mapping or aerial data. The tools that do exist tend to consider only a landscape’s steepness when estimating the time it takes to traverse across terrain. However, running up a steep road may be quicker than navigating a flat boulder field or bushwacking through chest-high shrubs. Firefighters, disaster responders, rural health care workers and professionals in myriad other fields need a tool that incorporates all aspects of a landscape’s structure to estimate travel times.
In a new study, researchers from the University of Utah introduced Simulating Travel Rates in Diverse Environments (STRIDE), the first model that incorporates ground roughness and vegetation density, in addition to slope steepness, to predict walking travel times with unprecedented accuracy.At the start of the day, the crew boss estimated how long it should take to get to the wildfire safety zone.
“One of the fundamental questions in firefighter safety is mobility. If I’m in the middle of the woods and need to get out of here, what is the best way to go and how long will it take me?” said Mickey Campbell, research assistant professor in the School of Environment, Society and Sustainability (ESS) at the U and lead author of the study.
The authors analyzed airborne Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) data and conducted field trials to develop a remarkably simple, accurate equation that identifies the most efficient routes between any two locations in wide-ranging settings, from paved, urban environments to off-trail, forested landscapes. They found that STRIDE consistently chose routes resembling paths that person would logically seek out—a preference for roads and trails and paths of least resistance. STRIDE also produced much more accurate travel times than the standard slope-only models that severely underestimated travel time.
“If the fire reaches a firefighter before they reach safety, the results can be deadly, as has happened in tragedies such as the 2013 Yarnell Hill fire,” said Campbell. “STRIDE has the potential to not only improve firefighter evacuation but also better our understanding of pedestrian mobility across disciplines from defense to archaeology, disaster response and outdoor recreation planning.”
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