ABOUT US

Wildfires are causing increasing destruction to the built environment, leading to injuries and loss of life, and devastating sensitive ecosystems. Although wildland fire can be beneficial and is required for the health of many natural environments, climate change and urban sprawl continue to exacerbate the global risk of high-severity, high-consequence fires.

Accruing evidence indicates that communities in the wildland-urban interface (WUI) are under threat of exposure to fire and are frequently ill-prepared to withstand its effects. Harmful smoke emissions can reach well beyond the perimeter of the fire and impact human health, livelihood, and the environment. Thus, without interventions, the negative impacts from wildland fires will be exacerbated in WUI communities in the coming years.

As wildland-urban fires are a rapidly growing challenge, there is a dire need for transdisciplinary approaches to fire safety and mitigation.

At Blaze Engineering we are committed to an interdisciplinary approach to wildfire risk. By covering meteorology, vegetation, and fire science under one umbrella, we use innovative methodology to convert data into meaningful input for firefighting agencies, public utilities, and other special interest groups to inform on wildfire risk. Some examples of this include:

Developed a workflow process to determine return intervals of weather variables, like wind gusts, from Remote Automated Weather Station data
Assisted in development of Public Safety Power Shutoff (PSPS) criteria and associated weather monitoring analytics for utilities in California and Nevada
Collaborated on an interactive dashboard for utilities to display results from proprietary fuel moisture sampling programs allowing utilities and agency partners to quickly view in-situ fuel and fire risk conditions
Analyzed fire hazard/risk associated with major housing developments in San Diego County including Otay Ranch and Newland Sierra
Assisted in the development of fire risk analysis and mitigation measures for hydroelectric dam removals in Northern California as well as analyzed potential changes in fire risk from dam removal and suggested mitigation measures
Developed an interactive dashboard for the United States Forest Service to display fire modeling and risk assessment metrics in a concise format that facilitates comparison between current wildfires for resource allocation and prioritization
Developed a procedure for creating synthetic weather trends in accordance with the methodology set forth by Finney et al. in “A Method for Ensemble Wildland Fire Simulation” (2011) in Python code from 4 km gridMET data
Reconstruction of initial spread of the 2017 Thomas Fire near Ventura, CA, the 2017 Starbuck Fire near Beaver, OK, and the 2011 Bastrop Complex Fire (Bastrop, TX), among others
Hypothesis testing for a fatal propylene explosion (Houston, TX) by using Python to calculate propylene flow rate and then inserting the results into a Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS) mockup of the structure where the explosion occurred

Areas Served:
California and the Continental US

Address

Business Hours

M-F 8am - 4pm