Considering the increasing growth of cities, population and urban fabric density, it seems necessary that emergency facilities and services such as fire stations are positioned optimally so that they can fulfill the demands well. The aim of this study is the optimization of equipment use in the fire stations, minimization the time to arrive at the incident through management of referral call to...

Over the last decade the number of operational incidents responded to, has the UK Fire and Rescue Service has diminished by approximately 40% (Knight, 2013). This reduction in incident number and consequential experiential learning opportunities has resulted in a deterioration of incident evaluation skills by the incident commanders. This paper will detail the application of the ‘Introspect mod...

How wildfires are managed is a key determinant of long-term socioecological resiliency and the ability to live with fire. Safe and effective response to fire requires effective pre-fire planning, which is the main focus of this paper. We review general principles of effective federal fire management planning in the U.S., and introduce a framework for incident response planning consistent with t...

Wildfire management in the United States and elsewhere is challenged by substantial uncertainty regarding the location and timing of fire events, the socioeconomic and ecological consequences of these events, and the costs of suppression. Escalating U.S. Forest Service suppression expenditures is of particular concern at a time of fiscal austerity as swelling fire management budgets lead to dec...

Background On Sunday 11th of December 2005, an explosion occurred at the Buncefield oil depot, Hertfordshire, resulting in a large fire that blazed for several days. Two Accident and Emergency (A&E) departments were placed on stand-by to receive casualties. A simple surveillance system was put in place during the acute phase of the incident, but this was not adequate to fully examine the health...

In this paper, a review had been made to the fire safety legislation in Hong Kong. Relevant academic papers published in mainstream journals were also surveyed and discussed. It has been pointed out in the literatures that the local government is taking an “incremental” or “ad-hoc” approach in which fire legislation is added or expanded in response to every tragic fire incident without a total ...

— This report describes the use of a support vector machines with a novel kernel, to determine the breathing rate and inhalation duration of a fire fighter wearing a Self-Contained Breathing Apparatus. With this information, an incident commander can monitor the firemen in his command for exhaustion and ensure timely rotation of personnel to ensure overall fire fighter safety.

Techniques for augmenting the automation of routine coordination are rapidly reaching a level of effectiveness where they can simulate realistic coordination on the ground for large numbers of emergency response entities (e.g. fire engines, police cars) for the sake of training. Furthermore, it seems inevitable that future disaster response systems will utilize such technology. We have construc...