Minus smoke and crackling flames, pixelated “fires” blazed across the computer screens of researchers in Berkeley’s Department of Mechanical Engineering as they studied simulated infernos for clues as to how to prevent future tragedy.
After the Southern California wildfires last winter destroyed more than 16,000 homes and buildings, claimed at least 30 lives, and cost the state billions in damages, studies like these have increasing urgency. Thankfully, a new paper led by Berkeley scientists and published in August in Nature Communications shows how simple measures could cut the scope of fire destruction by up to half.
Among the strategies is home hardening, which involves precautions like ember-proofing vents and replacing existing windows and roofing with materials that can better withstand extreme heat. Another involves clearing away all vegetation within five feet of a house—that’s about the length of your average pool cue. This strategy, called defensible space, is part of California’s proposed new “zone zero” rule; implementing that alone could cut the number of structures lost by 17 percent, researchers found. When combined with home hardening, that number can jump to as much as 50 percent.
Berkeley postdoctoral scholar Maryam Zamanialaei and her team utilized data from CAL FIRE that surveyed all destroyed and damaged structures from the past decade. Studying disasters like the 2020 Glass Fire, which destroyed some 1,500 structures, the team used cutting-edge fire simulation models and machine learning to predict the likelihood that a structure would survive a fire. The lessons were heartening.
“We can’t always change the spacing between structures or the exposure from flames and embers,” study senior author Michael Gollner, associate professor of mechanical engineering, told Berkeley News. “But even within those limitations, we still have the power to cut the destruction in half, if not more. That is very powerful.”
