Carcaixent fire impact against a self-protected WUI zone: lessons learned

Abstract

In June 2016, a forest fire had a head-on impact with some misalignment, but with aggressive local topographic behavior, to the Colonia Santa Marina residential settlement. This settlement had a Self-Protection Plan approved in 2007. The Plan was based on a forest fires protection system whose acronym is WUIPROTECT© (Wildland Urban Interface Defense System) and it included the self-projection planning for previous fire risk, the Owners Community training, fuel management and the installation defensive infrastructure. Both the Plan and the foreseen infrastructure for the nucleus were activated hours before the impact and contributed to the defense of the urbanized area. With this methodology of operations, on one hand, the risk of affecting population and intervening professionals is reduced by lowering temperature, radiation, secondary foci ignition potential due to short-distance flashes..., and on the other hand, environmental and infrastructures damage is reduced. Obviously, without the intervention of ground means, the result could have been different, in the same way that it would be if aerial means wouldn’t join the heli-transported brigades efforts, WUIPROTECT® reduces the intensity of the fire, causing it to reach extinction capacity, emulating in this way what would be focused land-based discharges whenever they are convenient. Due to the interest aroused by this unusual scenario, in which a developed forest fire impacts a residential area with a self-protection system, it has been considered convenient to proceed to analyze the facts to obtain some conclusions in order to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the system to improve its design, installation and operation. This document is a summary of the technical report made based on testimonies, photographs and on-site observations of the facts and their consequences. For this purpose, an intense work of interviews with intervening professionals, eyewitnesses and owners of Colonia Santa Marina residential settlement and several expert ground visits to document the events has been carried out.