- Title:
-
Analysis of Wildfire Threat: Issues and options
- Date:
- October 2004
- Organisations
- DSE
- Authors:
- Andrew A.G. Wilson
- Location:
- Victoria, VIC, Australia
Overview
Each year the possibility of wildfires in Victoria puts life, property and natural values at risk, and cause costs to be incurred. Losses occur most years despite—and indeed no matter how much—effort and resources fire agencies expend to prevent them. A perennial challenge in managing fires is to strike a balance between the levels of the costs and the losses.
Cost levels can be chosen directly, and losses indirectly. Choice of costs tends to depend on the resources available, perceptions of expected losses and their significance, and on the nature of any fires that eventuate. Losses depend on the nature of the fires, and on the effort—hence costs—incurred in preventing and suppressing them.
Important aids to choosing appropriate levels of effort and cost are measures of fire risk, hazard, danger and threat. Measures of threat, in particular, have been used to integrate both the ‘physics’ issues of whether a fire could start and be damaging, and the economic and social issues concerning the losses of values or assets such a fire could cause. The process of assessing threat has come to be known as Wildfire Threat Analysis.
The purpose of this report is to review issues of defining a measure of fire threat, and then propose options for developing and implementing a suitable measure to help fire agencies (in particular the Department of Sustainability and Environment—DSE) make decisions about fire management effort and cost; that is, about when, where and how much should be spent on fire prevention and suppression.
