Fire Science Show
Fire Science Show
222 - Integrating WUI risk management and fire safety engineering with Pascale Vacca
In this episode we try to demonstrate another step in integrating fire engineering into WUI risk management, and vice versa. These two areas together form some sort of fire engineering method, which I strongly believe will be an important part of our profession in the future. Today I got to sit down with Dr. Pascale Vacca from UPC to unpack a practical, end-to-end framework for wildland–urban interface risk that engineers can use today, which she has shared in her keynote at the ESFSS Conference in Ljubljana earlier this year.
From mapping hazard, exposure, and vulnerability across scales to chaining wildfire spread outputs into building-focused simulations, we show how careful modeling turns uncertainty into a plan communities can fund and maintain.
We begin with risk assessment that respects terrain, fuels, and construction typologies, then translate FARSITE’s rate of spread and fireline intensity into FDS boundary conditions to test real weaknesses—like heat flux and breakage in large glazed facades. The case study in Barcelona grounds it all: what happens when wind pushes a fast front toward a community center, and which retrofits move the needle? Noncombustible shutters, smarter venting, and defensible spacing emerge as high-ROI fixes, while fuel breaks and fuel treatments reduce intensity so crews can act. Along the way, we tackle data resolution, moisture, and weather selection—how to choose between worst case and representative scenarios and why that choice matters for policy and budgets.
Preparedness and recovery complete the cycle. Annual maintenance keeps gains from eroding as vegetation regrows; community preparedness days build habits and trust; and a homeowner app scores parcel risk to make decisions concrete. On the response side, precomputed scenarios and quick wildfire modeling inform shelter-in-place versus evacuation, aligning engineering insight with operational realities. We also confront limits: validation gaps, ember exposure, and the fact that risk is never zero. But the path forward is clear—interdisciplinary planning, better data sharing after fires, and education to bring more engineers into WUI work.
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Hello everybody, welcome to the Fire Science Show. By now I think you are aware of my stance about where wildfire engineering is going. I'm pushing this into the podcast as much as I can because I truly believe that engaging fire engineers into solutions of wildfire problems, engaging with communities, is really an important thing. We're the only ones who can do this kind of work. But I also see a rising opportunity for the industry at large, as I also see this becoming a product, a product of fire engineering that could be served to different stakeholders like communities, regional, municipal administration, etc., which want to invest in their safety assessments and improve the safety of their citizens through uh science engineering based uh decision making processes uh powered by a very difficult and challenging analysis. Therefore, I I try to build up a lineup of talks in the podcast that uh together kind of carve the way towards practical use of fire safety engineering as a framework in the world of wildfires. And of course, uh I'm just a podcaster, I'm not researching this, there are brilliant people who research this uh worldwide, and I was super happy when I saw a keynote at Ljubljana conference earlier this year by Dr. Pascale Vacca from University Politechnica Catalunia UPC, and Pascal did show exactly this. She shown a workable framework on how wildfire engineering could be performed. UPC is known for industrial fire safety, so Pascale seems obviously inspired by risk and approaches coming from the industrial sector, from chemical engineering, etc. So it it truly is a workable framework. And in this podcast episode, I ask her some deep deeper questions about how this framework looks like, how it can be applied, what are the challenges, what are the missing links, and uh what actually is the role of fire safety engineers at different stages of executing this. So, uh, while fire engineering is a future, it is a part of our profession already and will be an increasingly large part of our profession in the future. I think we all need to be aware how this works and how can we do it the best. So let's learn from those who are actually doing it. Let's spin the intro and jump into the episode. Welcome to the Fireside Show. My name Wojciech Wegrzynski , and I will be your host. Applications for OFR's 2026 graduate program are now open. If you're ready to launch your career with a supportive forward-thinking team, visit OFRconsultants.com to apply. You will join a worldless organization recognized for its supportive culture and global expertise. Start your journey with OFR and help shape the future of fire engineering. Hello everybody. I am joined today by Pascale Vacca from University Politecnica Catalonia. Hey Pascale, good to have you in the podcast.
Pascale Vacca:Hi, thank you so much for inviting me.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:And thank you. Thank you for coming to the Fire Science Show. I've really enjoyed your keynote in the recent conference in um Ljubljana. So that was very nice, and immediately I invited you for this. You took the invite, so here we are. So let's try to give a deeper dive into the keynote topic, which was integrating wild fire urban interface, fire risk management into the fire safety engineering practice, challenges and opportunities. I'm not sure if I want to start with challenges or opportunities. That's a tough choice. But maybe maybe the first question to ask is why do you think we need to integrate fire risk management into fire safety engineering practice? Perhaps let's start there.
Pascale Vacca:So, with all the events that we are seeing, you know, every summer and also in winter, as we've seen in LA, I believe that fire safety engineers can greatly contribute in basically reducing risk and reducing the consequences of wildfires when they reach urban communities. So that's I think that's it's a great opportunity for fire safety engineers to contribute to the to the problem.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:Do you think I I many times I've said in the podcast that I see this being a real job eventually? Like I even had people already emailing me, voice like I am already a wildfire uh engineer. Uh but do you think the wild the fire engineers could contribute at all parts of the process? How big the contributions could be?
Pascale Vacca:Yeah, so when we talk about uh the WUI fire issue, so the Warner Nurban Interface fire issue, we talk about different scales. So we have the landscape scale, that's the biggest scale, and then we can go down to the community scale, and then even smaller to the homeowner level. So when it comes to the landscape scale, this is where fire safety engineering would say has less of uh input because here it's where forest engineers are the experts. Um, but we can greatly contribute at the community scale and at the parcel scale. This is where buildings are located, this is where we can look at evacuation. Uh so this is kind of where uh our expertise would be really useful because we we're experts, of course, in a fire uh inside a building or in an industrial facility, but we can translate this expertise to you know what happens if the fire is coming from the outside and it's reaching the building.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:I share your opinion here. I think this though, I still uh see uh you know with the forest scale, with uh the developments like Winity and you know the tools that the colleagues around the world are building to uh manage like large-scale evacuations and fires, but I think there's still uh perhaps some preparedness work to be done. But I did indeed we can shine in the community scale. Um, you being in UPC, I know UPC always has been a place for industrial fire safety, you know, and it's it's made its name uh in this industrial fire safety is risk management. And uh I also see risk management in your approach. So are those two things connected? Are you like following the ideas of industrial uh risk management in in this space?
Pascale Vacca:Yeah, exactly. You're right. The the group Intertech is uh let's say most known for industrial fire safety, industrial risk. We also worked, I think now there's about 20 years of experience in wildfires. Um they started looking at fire retardants because we were in the chemical engineering department, so you know then you there's some penciling there. And then we move down to actually looking at risk. So when we talk about the wildfire that's reaching the woo, we also use a risk, let's say risk assessment approach. Uh we look at what's the hazard, you know, are you located in a hazardous area? Uh yes or no, what's the exposure, for example, that the community or reparsel is going to have when it comes to the wildfire, and then we look at the vulnerability of the community or of the building if we look at the smaller scale. So we still have this uh, let's say we still look at risk as a whole, so including all its uh parts.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:In the paper that you sent me, uh there's a formal way of doing this called the disaster risk management cycle, which covers the phases of risk assessment planning and and all the stages. I'll I'll briefly read through the phases and then we'll go in-depth into them because I really enjoyed that the fact that it's a framework, you know, it's it's not just uh a bunch of thoughts that uh it would be better if we did we did something with the problem. No, it's it's it's a it's a workable framework. And also um for those who were not in Ljubljana, Pascal has presented a full case study, applying a lot of what is being said in here to a specific uh part in uh uphill Barcelona. So we will not only cover the the theory, but we'll also try to discuss the case study, I hope. We can right. Okay, so let me let me just quickly read the the phases of disaster risk management cycle DRM. Assessment, risk management planning, risk prevention, emergency preparedness, emergency response, and recovery. How about we try and tackle them one by one? So, how do you see this integration of we risk management into fire safety engineering practice in the assessment stage? Like what is the stage and what engineers could do in it?
Pascale Vacca:Yeah, I think so. Risk assessment, I think this is what we are most comfortable with as fire safety engineers. We are used to do fire risk assessment when it comes to events, fire events inside buildings, so we can translate this to when a fire is coming from the outside. So basically, here is where we look at all the all the different components of risk. Um, so again, we look at the hazard, we look at the exposure, we look at the vulnerability. And this, the assessment, the typology of the assessment will depend on the scale that you're looking at. If you're looking at the community, you might want to look at different criteria and for different indicators compared to when you are looking at the parsley level. So, for the community, for example, uh, when it comes to the exposure, we might look at how the fire can percolate, can spread through the community, reaching the entire community, so not just the what the part that's facing the wineland. And this has also several components with, for example, uh the topography will help uh spreading the fire, the amount of vegetation or amount of fuels that inside the community uh can help spreading the fire. So at the community level, we might look at things more in general of the community. If we we might also, for example, include the construction materials of the most of the homes inside the community. It's not the same if we have a situation such as in what happened in LA or in Hawaii, where we had most of the houses made out of timber. So this also helps the fire spreading through the community. And it's different if we are, for example, here in Mediterranean Europe, where buildings are made out of concrete. So they're not gonna burn as much. Um, so we can look at these criteria, and then at the at the smaller scale, so the parcel level, uh, we can really look in detail at what are the vulnerabilities of a building. There's a lot of work that's been done already to identify which are the most vulnerable elements of a building to a fire that's coming from the outside, and then we can actually assess um what my case study did, what I did in the case study is that I assessed um the vulnerability of the building using a performance-based design approach. So I set some performance criteria, I had the fire spreading towards the building, and then I had a look at how the building is gonna react to the fire.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:We can actually touch a little more on that because it was an interesting case of modeling. So, from what I remember in the in the keynote, you've run uh FDS simulations for fire spread outside of the building and some fire approaching a building, and then uh you were investigating a facade, like a glazed facade, if I recall. Uh so maybe maybe give us some more detail about how you've used the fire engineering tool set in in this problem. Because like for me, I would simulate the building and see what's happening outside, you know, and you reverse the problem.
Pascale Vacca:Yeah, so the issue came because the area of uh Barcelona that's uh located at the WUI is quite a problematic area. So the firefighters came to us uh because they uh wanted to know whether they could use our civic senator, it's called basically a community senator of a neighborhood, if they could use it as a community shelter in case of a wildfire, because they knew that the situation of the homes located in the neighborhood was not really great when it comes to preparedness. So this was a real problem that we had. And so we decided to approach the issue first simulating a wildfire approaching the buildings because we wanted to know okay, what's the intensity of the wildfire that's gonna arrive at the building? We kind of took a worst case uh scenario and we ran a faresight simulation to know what would be the fairline intensity, what would be the rate of spread close to the building. And then once we have this information, this is our input for our FDS simulation. So this is we need some wildfire inputs to place in FDS. We don't have uh in when we do performance-based design for buildings, there are some PBD codes and guidelines that tell us, okay, with this type of uh occupancy, you have such heat release rate per unit area. And the fire is gonna be this big. We are not there yet when it comes to away fires. So this is how we did it. We needed some fire inputs with the outputs from Farsight to then input in FTS. And then we simulated a fire approaching with the rate of spread uh that far sight send, with the intensity that faresight send, and we could see it approach the building. Of course, you you also have to put the meteorological conditions in there, so the wind is really important because it's gonna push the flames towards a certain direction, depending on where the wind is coming from. Uh, and and this building had a very big glass facade just facing the wild end. Um, so we thought, okay, we know the light blazing facades are vulnerable to fire. Um, so we wanted to specifically simulate this because it was the most vulnerable element of the building. And then through the FDS simulation, you know what's the heat flux that's reaching the glass, what's the glass temperature, a surface temperature, and then you set some performance criteria, and then you see whether uh the situation. What we did was analyze the situation as it was, so see whether the building would resist the passing of a wildfire or no. And in our case, the result was that that the glazing would break. So we need to put some protection or we need to identify some mitigation strategies so that uh the glazing will not break.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:Yeah, but that's for the further phases. We'll come back to this. Uh we need to clarify what's far sight and how does one use that?
Pascale Vacca:Uh yeah. Okay, far sight is a wildfire spread model.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:Okay.
Pascale Vacca:It's a semi-empirical model. So it uses rotor mill to identify how the fire is gonna spread. Uh, you set an ignition point, you have to know the topography of the landscape, you set the meteorological conditions, and then with this, and and of course, very important, you need to have a fuel map uh so that we actually know what's burning, what's the vegetation uh that's burning, and then you can get lots of outputs from the simulation. Um, you can get arrival times, you can get rate of spread, fire line intensity.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:And the one that you can translate into something usable by FDS is which one? The intensity? The fire line intensity?
Pascale Vacca:Yeah, so what you can do is the um that there's also an empirical equation to calculate the flame depth. This is basically how deep the the flame of the firefront is. Um the fine line intensity is in kilowatt per meter. Okay, and then you divide by the flame depth. This is one of the one of the options.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:That's the interesting part, you know, because it's in principle it's only very uh logic and easy. You take one model, oh, it gives you an output, and then you put it into another model, and here you go. It's your normal everyday Far Safety engineering. But um, there are you know those conversions uh and the way how the models work is it's not one unified set of tools like you have to resort. And we could probably go deeper on Farsight uh with what's Rotoman model, how it has been developed, and how how does wind and fuel go into that, but that would be an entire podcast episode. So I'll probably uh stop with the details of the Farsight in here because I have other questions for the assessment process. Um, it's a risk assessment, so I wonder how the quantification of the probabilities look like, or or are like first of all, do you even care about ignition or you look only on the probability that something spreads in certain conditions? Because I have an intuitive feeling that ignition will be very, very difficult to quantify.
Pascale Vacca:Yeah, uh of course. So for us, we assume that ignition will happen. Yeah, um, luckily in Catalunya, so we are analyzing the specific cases in Catalonia, uh, the firefighters did a great job in collecting past uh fire perimeters, past ignitions, and they kind of identified for each small area of Catalonia the typology of fire that is most probable based on what happened in the past. So, for example, for the area that we analyzed, they identified two different types of fire that would happen most probably. One was is pushed by the wind and the topography, and the other one would be a prune-dominated fire. Okay. I mean, we are very lucky that this work was previously done. So we can use it as a base for certain areas. In other areas, it might be more difficult to have this information. So then you might go more on a deterministic base of like, okay, what's my main wind direction? So, based on that, what's gonna happen if I have an ignition in the worst case uh location based on the wind? Yeah, it's not easy if you if you have limited information. You can look at past fires, but uh I'm I don't know if each country is recording this, if it's publicly available or not.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:It may also be a case of a small sample size, like think think Nordic countries. I don't think they can base the future on uh the past fires, like I had Nieves in my podcast, and that was that was the biggest issue for them. Uh how about the fuel? Because one, I assume you need to understand what biologically is there, like is it trees, bushes, what kinds of them? But also I think it's important for you what state they are. Like, are they dried? Are they alive? Like in Poland, they would go through seasons, so that probably also is this something you account for?
Pascale Vacca:Uh yeah, so when you look at the information that's available, so you have the the fuel map, and of course, this has different resolution depending on where your information is coming from. So this also impacts your results. Of course, it's it's better to have a finer resolution because then you can really go at a smaller scale, specifically when it comes to our work. Maybe at the landscape scale, it's not as important, but when you look at the community level, it's really important to have at the smaller scale as like up to a single tree scale, like no, no. For example, I would say we uh in Catalonia we have 20 meters by 20 meter. Uh, I think that's uh that looks like fine enough because then you can really distinguish what's the urban area. So what's in the according to the fuel map is not gonna burn. Then we can talk about this because this will also burn. Uh what is urban area, and then you can really distinguish what is agricultural uh fields, uh, what is the wildland, and then you have, of course, the distinction you have shrubs, you have forest. And you also have information on the bulk density of each technology and on the moisture content as well. So this is where where we uh look at the conditions of the vegetation. Uh we can have you know very low moisture for the dead fuels, and then uh we can have live trees as well. One of the issues of these fuel maps, however, is that they are not up to date. So sometimes the fuel map is telling you, for such as in the case study that we did, the fuel map is telling you that you have shrubland, and when you actually go there and look at the vegetation, you see pine trees as well. So the the that is not updated, and also on the other side, the fuel that is selected, for example, in Farside is the one that's gonna be carrying the fire. So if you have different typologies, you actually are using the one that's gonna be carrying the fire. So in our example, it was shrubland because it's the shrubs that are gonna be carrying the fire mostly.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:As we're talking about the opportunities for fire safety engineers, I would like maybe I'm naive, but perhaps like a fire engineer could also do the survey themselves, like take a drone, fly around the area and just map it. In if 20 by 20 is your grid that that's sufficient for you. I think that's that's quite a manage, like at a community center scale, like you were presenting in in uh UPC. I mean, that that's a scale of a part of the terrain and the building which you're comfortably modeling with FDS. So uh for any fire safety engineer uh listening, like it's it's it's not really huge, it's like few hundred by few hundred meters that's manageable. Could imagine like just going there with a drone and uh and you know mapping it for yourself.
Pascale Vacca:Yeah, actually we did this in a in a project uh several years ago. So we had a drone to and basically we had like a 3D with the through the drone, we had a 3D uh image of the area that we wanted to analyze, and then we specifically know okay, the vegetation is located here, uh, and then we could translate this to basically FDS obstacles, you know. Uh this was done, it was like I'm not expert at that voxelization of uh, and then this was really easily imported into pyrocene, and then we had obstacles for FDS. Of course, this is a big difference because when you are looking at uh fire spreading through the vegetation, like you don't really care about, let's say, the 3D shape of the vegetation. You know, the forest is gonna spread mainly on at the surface, so and then it's of course it's gonna catch, you know, if you have a shrub that's close to the surface, it's gonna catch this. Uh, but at the moment we are simulating in FDS, we are simulating the vegetation just as a vent, uh like a burner, like typical. Yeah, exactly. As a burner, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. On the 3D on the drone. This was uh uh we use this to uh then create virtual reality experiences. Uh so this is something that when it comes to the prevention and preparedness side is really interesting because then you can place the people inside their neighborhood or inside on their parcel, and you can have a fire starting, and they can see actually how the fire will spread towards the community or towards their home. So this is something that we did with uh David Caballero. He's uh an expert on way fires in Spain. So yeah, this is also something really interesting where engineers can contribute for sure.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:Wow. Well, uh it's it's great to discover that that like those uh ideas and concepts are turning into like uh research and then into tools because it means that this will propagate, and in some years this this will really be uh something that a single engineer, like single fire engineer, like you're delivering a fire strategy to a building today, like you could actually do that study. And I I wouldn't mind flying to um to Spain and fly a drone and do some modeling in field. Uh that that doesn't sound like a bad job to me. If you if it is if it could uh support living. Um one more um so so in in this uh set of boundary conditions, I also have weather on my list. So so how weather is quantified? Like one, do you care about like do you care about the range of probable wins or you just care about the worst ones? And how do you quantify which one is the worst, actually?
Pascale Vacca:Yeah, um, well, this depends on on what the focus of your analysis is because one thing is okay, I want to know whether a building can survive a worst case fire scenario. Then you go for the highest wind gusts in uh that happened in uh in a certain day, highest temperatures, lowest moisture, moisture content. So it really depends on what uh what the objective of the study is. If you want to analyze a worst case scenario, then go for the extreme, you know. If if you want to analyze okay, what's gonna happen in my average wildfire day, then you what we did is we looked at a meteor situation in a past wildfire that was uh I think I believe it was one in 2015. Uh um this was uh a couple of days for Catalunya where it was they had several uh fires, and so we thought this would be a representative day for for uh you know a wildfire event. So um yeah, depending on on the objective, depending on what you want to look at, then you you choose uh different meteorological scenarios. And also again, you might want to look at the probability of this fire, you know, it might be a worst case fire scenario, but actually it's an unlikely wind direction for the area. So you also need to look at that what's the most likely wind direction, uh, what's gonna happen on a day where I have, you know, my typical uh meteorological conditions for the area, or look at the worst case.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:Yeah, like you said before, you you were supported by your firefighters who already identified the plausible scenarios for you. So I guess those were also connected with the wind direction to some extent. So it and and you had data from previous fires that occurred, which probably followed those uh those typologies of fires uh identified by firefighters. So that's a a great side of references to start with. And I can also imagine someone being in a completely blind like this is a village in the middle of uh of a of a country. Please tell me like what are the what's the the fire risk management I should do. And in that case, I guess you probably would lean towards like a complete parametric study of of different winds and different ignition locations in different fuels and different weathers. But I think FarSight supports that, right? You can do uh probabilistic in Farsight.
Pascale Vacca:Yeah, yeah. And also Farsight, the the let's say the good thing about Farsight is that simulation run really fast.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:Okay.
Pascale Vacca:So in in a time of I don't know, minutes, you have your results already. So it's not like FDS where you you know a model that then such as one that we run took I think it took close to two weeks to so because once you put a wind in FDS, it slows down everything, you know, because the competition is a very important thing.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:And you also need uh and you need a large domain, yeah.
Pascale Vacca:Yeah, exactly. Um, so the good thing about fire site is you can run lots of simulations uh very quickly, so then you can have an idea of uh, you know, how's the fire gonna spread if I put my ignition point over here? What about my if my ignition point is somewhere else? So yeah, this is why it's great. Of course, it has its limitations, but also I always say like we you know, you know, we have to work with what we have at the moment because if we say uh okay, I mean, uh it's not realistic, we cannot use it. Uh engineers still need tools to work with. So at the moment, this is what we have. Uh it's a better than nothing, and so we we should use it, we should take advantage of it.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:Yeah, okay, let's go back to the disaster risk management cycle. Uh, assessment you said is the closest to fire safety engineers. So, as uh as we're fire safety engineers, uh we spend a good chunk of time uh talking about it, but there are uh more phases: risk management planning, risk prevention, emergency prep, uh emergency response and recovery. So let's try risk management planning. So you've done your fire safety engineering assessment, are you still needed in the project as fire safety engineer?
Pascale Vacca:You are, you are, because this is the phase when you've done your risk assessment, you know what the outcomes are, and then uh this is the in the management phase, this is where you propose solutions. So you can propose solutions, for example, when it comes to hardening structures, when you look at the parcel level and you look at a structure specifically, you can pinpoint what are you know you've pinpointed before what are the vulnerabilities of the building, and you can try mitigating these vulnerabilities. Of course, it's different providing solutions in the sense, especially when we talk about the homeowner, in the sense of like you have to change your entire roof structure because it's uh you. Horrible. This is something that might not be feasible for the homeowner. So then you also have to think what are actions that are feasible for the homeowner to implement to reduce vulnerability. And then if it comes at the for the community level, mitigation strategies could be implementing a fuel break or increasing the size of a fuel break or create fire breaks. So when I talk about fire breaks, this means this is an area where there is zero vegetation. Okay, so you create uh basically an empty space so that the fire cannot spread through that space. And when we talk about a fuel break, it's an area where there is vegetation, but the vegetation has been reduced so that the fire basically the idea is that the fire would lose intensity through the fuel break, so that when it reaches the community, the fire has already a much lower intensity so that firefighters can act. So this could be some strategies. And here, when when it comes about the fuel treatment, of course, here is where we would need help from other professionals because um we have not experts for sure in fuel treatments. Uh so this is where um the interdisciplinarity of the problem shows up. And uh so we need to work on this. And when we talk about vulnerability, uh especially at community level, we might also want to analyze social vulnerability of the community. So then we will need help of social scientists as well. Um, so this is the phase where we are proposing solutions where we also have to think outs a bit outside the box and also involve other professionals, other experts in uh in several fields.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:So in in your case study, you've identified there is a potential issue with the fire coming to that community center. That was your assessment phase. How did you respond to that in the management phase of the cycle?
Pascale Vacca:Um so we saw that the glazing system in a worst case scenario would not be able to resist to the fire, tracking would happen. Um so one of the things that can be easily implemented is to place shutters in front of the system. Uh, this is a solution that we've seen very often, and it's kind of a simple solution, and it's very effective. Um, the glazing is well protected. Of course, it depends on the material of the shutters. You don't want to place uh PVC or plastic materials because that's gonna melt and then it's gonna also gonna burn and contribute to the fire.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:That's why you need a fire safety engineer there, not uh not someone who has no idea what they're doing.
Pascale Vacca:Exactly, exactly. You need to know also the what material you have to put. So, for example, aluminium we've seen is a great material, of course, fire-rated shutters, and you have the top. Uh, so these are kind of simple actions that you can do to harden the structure and to reduce vulnerability in that sense. Then on the other side, if we look at the the fuels surrounding the buildings, this is also where we can have a look at, you know, okay, what can we do so that the fire actually doesn't reach the building? In the case study, there was a fire break of seven meters, so there was no vegetation for seven meters in front of the facade, and we saw that this was not enough. So we might want to also suggest to increase this fire rig so that the vegetation the wine vegetation is located further from the building. Or we might want to suggest a fuel treatment so that they actually have a fire break first and then a fuel brick so that we would reduce the intensity of the fire breaching the building. So there are similar options there. Some things are you know, placing shutters, okay, that's you know an easy solution. Uh when it comes to the fuel treatment, then we will need more analysis for sure to see up to what distance do I need the fuel treatment, uh, up to what distance do I need the fire break? And here again, it's the interdisciplinarity of the issue. Uh, it's not just the fire engineer that can provide a solution when it comes to the fuel treatment.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:Okay, so that's what that was risk management planning. You're needed to to to plan uh the the solutions, and now from planning we move to risk prevention, I guess. This is when you execute the plan.
Pascale Vacca:Exactly.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:Yeah, yeah.
Pascale Vacca:So this is where the execution happens. So uh, I mean, here we can the fighter engineer, of course, can still follow. You know, it's kind of like when you when you are you've designed the uh a smoking heat control system of the building, you you give the project, you give your design, and then you see it actually implemented on site.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:Well, it is it sounds like a side inspection part of the building project. But I but I assume it's also like I think this is the part where you would try to communicate the plan to other stakeholders because I assume you work with a specific group of people who are, I don't know, the safety officer of a community. Uh that's the person you probably work at up to this point because they're paying for your work and they're paying you to to do the plan. And now the plan turns into an actionable item, and suddenly a lot of other people are involved in the in the project right now because there's people who have to execute, people who have to uh you know discuss it with with the with the community, people who have to plan logistics, etc. So I assume uh the role is actually a lot in discussing with those stakeholders on how their actions might impact the execution and and getting the plan right.
Pascale Vacca:Yeah, ideally, you want your stakeholders to be involved from day one. Okay, so when it comes to risk.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:We're not in the ideal world.
Pascale Vacca:Ideally, yeah. But for example, the for us, the firefighters, this is something that they are really useful when it comes to the risk assessment phase because they can actually they've been on the field, they know, so they can give great inputs on your inputs of your risk assessment. So ideally, you I would say firefighters are key stakeholder in this case. Um, so you would want them on board uh from day one to check whether they think that you're what you're doing is is actually you know what what they see as risk, what they see as a hazard, what they see as the vulnerability in the area. Um because they might have also other scenarios in mind that you did not think about, you know. So this is something that's uh important. And then yes, when it comes to the execution of the actions uh that you, the mitigation actions that you've identified, uh then yes, then it depends again on the type on the building. So if you if it's a private home, then of course it's the homeowner who, you know, it has to be feasible for them. If it's a community center, as our case study, then it's the municipality uh that's involved in there. So you need to talk with the municipalities to see what is feasible for them to do. Because, for example, they can provide the fuel treatments around the building. And since the building is is a public building, they might also have to look for the funding to place the shutters in front of the lating system. So, yeah, it depends on what you're looking at. Usually I would say this type of assessments, they're not done for the private person, they're done more for uh public buildings or public entities. So this is when there you have to see what is feasible for them to execute.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:I can only speculate, but I think you know, from the business perspective as in to whom an engineer would be giving those services, I think the community is a good stakeholder to work with because uh the costs are then like within the budgets of communities, like they can handle quite large costs for those assessments. If they decide they want to invest in safety, and and uh speaking from Polish experience and seeing like the amounts of funds that are going to uh warp partners and shelters and and stuff like that, not to wildfires, but uh to our uh little uh annoying neighbors. That's a lot of money going through the design world right now. A lot, like unbelievable amount of money from our perspective. So I can see why community would be a good partner. If you think about the single homeowner, I think it would be perhaps more connected with insurance, maybe. I could see that. Like I'm not sure to what extent it's true, but I I've heard that uh in California it's very difficult to insure your property because of the wildfire risk. So if that is the case, I can imagine some sort of framework emerging where the insurance is after some sort of uh risk assessment and management plan and implementing that plan. I that would make sense to me.
Pascale Vacca:Like, yeah, in Europe we we have not seen yet insurance being a stakeholder in in this problem, they have not yet participated in this. I think in the next years they will have to they will have to participate in this problem. Uh and actually I think insurance might play a very big role when it comes to preparedness and prevention of the homeowner. Because they can say, like, okay, if your home doesn't respect these characteristics, I cannot insure you, or uh your insurance fee is gonna be really high. If you implement some vulnerability reduction strategies, then I can lower your fee. Um, so I think they have a big role to play in here when it comes to preparedness and prevention. But in Europe, we have not seen that yet.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:Yeah, I mean, and for fire engineers' perspective, I think this is important because it's very unlikely that the insurance person will do the assessment on their own. Like in this case, I think they would have to uh really use some third-party fire engineering principle with competencies, like uh uh, etc., to believe that this assessment is done well. Like when you insure a house, there's a assessor that assesses the value of the house in in such a way. Well, that is just like we could probably go go much deeper on this, but this is an interesting feature and and the context of of why your keynote is important because that truly is the future of fire safety engineers. Um, in this in in this, you use two keywords, risk prevention and risk mitigation. Is there a distinct difference between them? Is it is it important, or is it just two words that are used for the same thing?
Pascale Vacca:No, I think that there's a difference in there. So risk mitigation strategies are those that you implement when you know uh when you've done your risk assessment, uh, and you know, okay, these are my vulnerabilities, uh, and this is what I can do to uh to reduce uh the risk in general. But mainly when we talk about a risk at the Wii, I think we can mostly work on reducing vulnerability because the hazards are gonna be there because if you're in a wildfire prone area, you know, there's gonna be wildfires. You can touch a little bit on exposure, but then you know, there's still gonna be the fire's still gonna be reaching in some ways. Uh it's gonna be reaching the community. So I think vulnerability is is where we can do the most work to reduce then the risk. And um when it comes to preparedness, this is more like these are actions that you do every day to um make sure that when the fire is arriving, you are not vulnerable to the fire or not as vulnerable as you should be. Um I have done actions that can help reduce vulnerability, but I have done them. So it's not that I, you know, in the management, I've identified the action and in the preparedness, it's I've maintained for a long time this action because of course things are changing constantly. The vegetation is growing again, the fuels that I have around my building are changing constantly. If I don't maintain them, then it's gonna be so preparedness, it's more for me about like constantly maintaining this this faith so that once the event happens, I am prepared for it. I've done all that I can to reduce the risk.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:And in this in this preparedness stage, is do you see a lot of work for fire safety engineering? I I think this is the part where spreading the knowledge is the thing, education.
Pascale Vacca:I don't know, like yeah, so this is where basically we, as you said, we we go out to the world and spread the information. In the US and in Canada, there are great examples of this. We have what is called a preparedness day, it's once a year, and they get the community gets together, they learn about risk of wildfires, they learn about the vulnerabilities of their community, and they work together to reduce uh the vulnerabilities. So I think this is where the fire engineer comes here as an expert. Okay, so they talk with the community as an expert to show, okay, these are the actions that you can do. I've analyzed this in a scientific way, in an engineering way, so I can tell you which actions will be effective specifically for your case. This is also something that's really important when we talk to a community. It's really important to be very specific with the characteristics of the community. We've had several meetings with communities here located at the WI here in Spain. And what we've seen is that they already know, because here, of course, uh there's a little bit of risk awareness already when it comes to the population. Not very much, but a little bit. Uh so they already know a bit the general spiel of, you know, uh, okay, we're in a wildfire prone area. Uh, you know, if uh the firefighters tell you to stay inside, you should stay inside, you should not evacuate. But what they actually want to know is, okay, for my community specifically, for the characteristics of my community, the fuels that I have around, what should I do? So this is really, really important to then address, address the issue community per community.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:In case of the community you were investigating as your case study, did you did you have the chance to reach this phase and to work with the community?
Pascale Vacca:Yeah, so we are working with three different communities through the Fire Prime project. Uh, this is a project that's funded by the DG ECOS, the European uh Union uh civil protection mechanism. And so in this project, we really focus on preparedness. So we had a first preparedness day as well with these three communities, and the first one was a bit more general, and the feedback that we got was exactly this. They said, okay, we really want to know what uh with our community, what's gonna happen. So then we're gonna have a second one actually in two weeks, and the plan is to divide the uh people between the three communities. So we will have, let's say, one table per community, we'll put a map on the table and we actually analyze okay, what's gonna happen in case of a wildfire when it approaches your community? So we have had really great feedback from the community. We also uh we are in the phase of developing an app, a phone app, uh, for the homeowner to be aware of the risk at his parcel. So we ask several questions about the state of the building, about the building materials, about the state of the surroundings, and then the homeowner gets a score for vulnerability of its time for the hazard, which is based, um, this is based on the on the danger map. And then we multiply vulnerability with the hazard to get the risk. So the homeowner gets a score of risk for his house, and then he gets suggestions on how to reduce on this part on how to reduce the vulnerability because of course, about the hazard, it's on a map, you cannot do much about that. And we also got great feedback from the uh people that we worked with on the app. Uh so we're really honestly we're we're really happy uh when uh we collaborate with the communities and when they are actually uh really willing to collaborate with us.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:It's encouraging, but I think they they must consider you as allies. Like you're not uh like you know, when I when I'm a fire safety engineer and I go to construction site, oh boy, I'm not an ally. Like I'm the I am the most annoying person in the in the construction yard, and everyone hates me. Like because I tell them things that they do not like, I tell I tell them things that everything's wrong and you have to fix it, and it costs money and time, and they hate me. But I think when you're when you when the product is the safety of community and the people you work with, they care to be be safe, they care that their children are safe. And if you tell them you see your your your roof is kind of creating you an unsafe regime and this is why, I think they're they don't treat you as a hostile, telling you oh, your roof is wrong. You're someone giving them a helping hand, telling you know what, from all the things that could happen, the roof is probably the one that's gonna go wrong. I feel it's a different kind of dynamic. Perhaps if you come there with an insurance agent who wants to uh increase their premium, you're not gonna be that welcomed, but uh but I think working with community is nice. I I also think this is the the phase where it ends if there's no fire. Because uh with with this, if there's no fire, there's no response, there's no recovery. So eventually go back to assessment. How often those cycles should repeat, like reassessments? Three years, five years?
Pascale Vacca:Uh that's a great question. Uh honestly, in the context of climate change, I guess we would have to look at the assessment regularly. I don't know if five years, a five-year cycle is enough. Um, or we should do it every two years. This also depends on on what you know how how much things are changing in the landscape, how much things are being done. For example, if you have to implement the fuel break, you do it year one, then it's perfect. Okay, then you have a great fuel break. Year two, okay, you have some vegetation growing. Year five, you might have to, you know, if if no maintenance happened, then of course your risk assessment is not valid anymore because if you counted on this fuel break and it's not there anymore, then you know results have changed. So yeah, I mean, it's constantly a changing landscape. So we need to think about this. And also temperatures are going up every every year, temperatures are increasing, which means moisture level of the vegetation is going down. So yeah, this is not something that's done once and that's it.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:If we want this to become an engineering product and a service, I think this is an important aspect of that product to be well thought. Perhaps a fuel survey should be done every year, or reassessment of change should be done every year. And based on that, you can say, okay, you know what, there is a sufficient amount of change that you need to repeat uh the modeling parts, or you need to repeat the the far side simulation, whatever. There's a lot of work for us as people who are you know thinking the the frameworks for you to figure out that because I it if this becomes a product, it it needs to come with its information. Like you see, this is like it's not you're buying a one-time assessment for your uh uh hundred years of your village. It's it's like it's gonna change and and you have to readjust. In the response and recovery phases, like do we really have a lot of stuff to do? I in recovery, I guess yes, but uh in the response, how do you feel about that?
Pascale Vacca:Well, in response, this is uh I I don't know if we can do something like that's immediate in the sense okay, there's a fire, uh, I can help out on this. What we can do for the response part is more thinking ahead and looking at suppression options that we might have. I told you SETEC has a bit of history in looking at fire retardants. So this is where also we can participate in this, or looking at the suppression infrastructure, you know, do we have enough water points in the community or not? Where can, you know, where's the water going to be coming from? Um, we can support more in things like that. So support uh the the people that then are gonna go on the field to actually suppress the fire.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:Though arguably if you do a great job at assessment uh stage with your analysis, that this will be useful in the response.
Pascale Vacca:Yeah, for sure, for sure. And so if you do a great job in the assessment and then in setting litigation measurements, then uh you're really aiding the fire brigade in the sense that they are more um they're not as concerned with the community because they know that uh you know some actions have been have been done to reduce the vulnerability or the risk. Um so they can focus a bit more on actually going and suppress the wildfire than on putting all the energies in protecting a community. Um at the moment, what we are seeing with the firefighters is that they have to employ a lot of people in protecting communities, and of course, it there's a limited amount of uh of firefighters. So if they are all placed by the communities, then nobody's going to stop the wildfire, or they only have a chance to stop the wildfire when it's actually reaching the community. So for sharing with this, uh also when when we talk uh with the firefighters here of Barcelona, what's really important for them when it comes to the risk assessment is to know whether a community is really, really vulnerable. Uh, because if it is, then they say, okay, at moment zero of the welfare, everybody out of this community. You know, uh evacuation should happen immediately. One, if they know that the community is not as vulnerable, they can wait a little bit. Uh, because now, in specifically in Catalunya, the strategy is more of shelter in place uh rather than evacuate. After what happened in Mati and in and in Portugal, where you know people actually died on the roads evacuating, this is something that's really scary. So because our homes are made of mainly of non-combustible materials, so they are less vulnerable to fire, they are the strategy now is to ask people to shelter in place, and they are only evacuating areas where they see that okay, shelter in place is not an option.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:I though this is again based on previous assessment, not something that's happening while the fire happens. There's no time for fire modeling, there's no time for parametric fire side simulations when the fire happens.
Pascale Vacca:Well, when the fire happens, the firefighters have fire analysts that are running simulations to have an idea, okay, in in four hours, where's the fire gonna be at? To then plan, okay, should we is the fire gonna impact this community? Yes and no. So they do have these uh fire analysts that once the ignition happens, they are running scenarios to then guide those that are on the field to tell them, okay, it's gonna reach this village, we have to evacuate it or not, you know.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:So in this case, the fire service is another place where uh fire engineers could be needed. Prefer uh in a preferred way, uh, firefighters who are fire engineers. That's actually what's important. The firefighting officers are fire engineers in Poland, every single of them.
Pascale Vacca:So fire engineers are or in this case, if we talk about the landscape forest engineers.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:Okay, that's probably more rare. Uh and uh in the recovery phase, uh, what's happened then? Assessment of the vulnerabilities and failures and rebuild without them?
Pascale Vacca:This is where we can also uh have a you know, we do a great job there. First of all, collecting all the information on what happened, uh, what happened to the buildings that ignited or that did not ignite, you know, then you analyze the characteristics of the buildings that were not as damaged and those that were damaged to make a comparison. So ideally, again, in the ideal world, we would have a database that's available for everybody with all that information. Uh, so this is something that we would like to push for at some in some moment to have a database where we have information on past fires and what happened, because this is then really useful uh for the recovery phase to know, like, okay, this community, for example, the buildings ignited because there was another building close by that ignited, and then the fire spread building to building. So it was not an issue of the fire spreading through the vegetation anymore, but it was a fire spread building from one building to another. Then in this case, we can suggest when rebuilding, this is really difficult to then implement, but we can suggest to increase separation distances, for example, or remove uh as much of the combustible elements of the building, uh, you know, as much as possible. Or if the fire spread more through the fuels uh inside the community, then you can think about okay, maybe when we rebuild, we should remove these types of fuels and replace them with another type. So this is something where where we can suggest a way to rebuild that is more, let's call it fire adaptive.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:I'm not so hyper-optimist about you know the database of previous fire studies. Because it's it's really a lot of data to go through and it's a lot of uh knowledge to be to be built. Like I I just had a few episodes ago, uh Eric Link from uh from NIST when when they were doing the campfire study. And and it's just a single wildfire, but it's such a massive study, you know, to go in depth over that one one campfire. And there has been since then probably like 20, 30 wildfires of maybe not the same like horrible outcomes and and the magnitude of destruction, but but large wildfires which could have been studied in the same like uh systematic way, and each of them could be a two, three-year research project, you know, to go in depth. So actually, I mean, I understand why we would need that and why it would be awesome to have that. It's just very difficult to get to that point.
Pascale Vacca:I think in Europe it might be a bit easier to implement because we don't have as many losses. So, for example, here we had uh a firefighter, firefighting corps that there's a section just dedicated to looking at the structural elements of the building once a fire has happened to see whether you know the structure is gonna collapse or not, whether people can go back to their homes or not. And they are collecting all this information, but it remains with them, you know, with that it's not made available. So we already have people that are collecting this information. Uh so we just need one more step to where, like, if we ask for it, it's there to analyze.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:I would highly love uh to have access to such information, and I'm very happy to receive one. And uh I support any uh work towards uh standardized reporting and improvements in data collection, especially to the fire response and structural response of buildings to fires. Um a question that I've asked you during the conference, and uh now you have more time to answer that than on the conference. So you're using a lot of tools, and and those tools are are often used, let's maybe not beyond the scope, but beyond the comfort zone of a fire safety engineer, like applying FDS to this external fire spread, uh applying fire site to create you uh a burner for FDS. How do you feel about the validation studies of those tools in terms of I don't see anything wrong with using them right now? Like you said, we work with what we have. But how what do we base our opinion that they're applicable to the scenarios and how we how we care for validity of those tools in this usage right now?
Pascale Vacca:So uh I know of a uh some studies that have been done in a I don't know if to call it a prescribed burn or uh let's say a small experiment. Basically, they had uh a small hill and then they placed and let's say uh a fake house on the top of the hill. So they built some, you know, with some concrete blocks, and it was, I mean, if it was shrubland, the vegetation. So they started with the fire line, they started the fire, and they made it run through the hill, and then well, through the hill, through the small slope that they had, and then they placed sensors on this house, and then. And they run FDS simulations based on this. So this is one of the ways where we can see whether FDS can actually predict what's happening in reality or not. Or whether we are completely off. Now, I've only seen, let's say, maybe two or three studies of this. So for sure, there's more work to be done there. I mean, for us uh researchers, it's always nice to do an experiment and then uh, you know, validate run an FDS simulation with this. So this would be uh a path that we can follow. Uh it's not always possible to do experiments, and especially this was a very quite a controlled environment when it comes about a wildfire that's you know in the landscape, it's built up a lot, the intensity is huge. Uh, this, of course, is it's much more difficult to unless when there's a real wildfire, you go to a house and you place your thermocouples and your death. But I see it's much more difficult.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:I think people would be pissed like they're evacuating, like, could I just like leave a thermocouple in here?
Pascale Vacca:Yeah, yeah. Here we would think about have to think about the ethics uh of it all the further. Uh, but then another thing that's being worked on right now is to simulate vegetation as particles in FDS. And this is something interesting because when it comes to, for example, to firesight, when you've done a fuel treatment, you cannot really analyze this on firesight. And also, and the same, like when you put the inputs in FDS, when you put your fire inputs, you don't really know what uh you know what the heat release of perianitaria will be of that piece of uh vegetation that's been treated versus not. So the particle method would be something that's interesting to look at this type of scenarios. When I've applied fuel treatment, so my bulk density has been reduced. I have much less vegetation, I have, let's say, maybe a bit more of a surface vegetation. Uh, I have trees that with no vegetation touching the surface, so they have been pruned. But and this is something that's been worked on. Um, we've had a little bit of a validation happening with uh the work of Mel. Uh, and I know that in Maryland they are working on this as well, but we're still, I would say, in the in the initial phases of this.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:Yeah, the other end would be like take the real-world case studies and simulate those fires. But again, I I would find it quite difficult and on a scale of a very large research project. I think an interesting amount of knowledge will come uh out of maturity of the of the method. So I can imagine this method is applied to, let's say, a thousand communities. And then unfortunately, there must be a fire in some of them because we're we are doing that because they are at risk, because the fire is a real problem. It's not a made-up problem, it's a real problem that can touch them, which means the probability a fire will happen in those communities is is quite large. So there must be fires. And and when there are fires, you can go back to the assessment and see how well uh this matched with the real with the real fire. And I think these difficult lessons, there will be difficult lessons. There will be times when we get it perfectly, there will be times where we've done uh horrible work and it went uh quite opposite, either through our uh mistakes or inability to account for some things we were not aware of. But I think from those we will get the lessons on on the applicability of the tools. And uh also, you know, uh, I think a lot of safety comes from the process, not necessarily the outcomes of your uh calculations, you know. So that's what chemical engineers tell me. Like the process is the important part. The outcomes are are nice and and and important, but the process thinking about it, asking questions, like uh reassessing that that's the important part.
Pascale Vacca:Yeah, and I wanted to say also really highlight the fact that um so you run on the simulations, you have your results, you implement uh your risk reduction measures. Risk is never gonna be zero. Okay, so even if you do everything correctly, we've seen examples in Canada. I've seen several videos where they had homes were like in perfect conditions, the gardens were in perfect conditions, nothing there, just the green grass, and still you can see the fire brands doing lots of damage. So we can for sure help in reducing the risk and reducing vulnerabilities. But it's really important that we also communicate that you know it's not a risk, it's never gonna be zero. And for me, the uh we can do what we have done, what we can. For sure, we can limit losses a lot, but yeah.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:There are arguably if if if there was a fire that destroyed the hardened house, it's unlikely that an unhardened house will survive. It's still like uh an improvement. It's just it's just sometimes the scale of the improvement is is insufficient for the problem. But nevertheless, I think it doesn't, it shouldn't prevent us from doing the job. And as we do more of that, as we gain expertise, as the tools improve, we will be just better and better in doing that. So um perhaps some final words uh your message to the world of fire safety engineering, uh, after all of this, let's encourage them to look into the problem of all-land urban interface fire management.
Pascale Vacca:Yeah, of course. So we have, as I said, uh great opportunities, great challenges when it comes to this for fire safety engineers because it's a new field. It's something that emerged recently, the the need of risk reduction at the uh at the Wen and Urban Interface. You know, it's something that emerged in the last 10 years. So uh lots of research to be done, lots of tools that are available. As we said, they might not be very perfect, but there are tools available for engineers that they can use to analyze the problem. But also another thing that I think we should be focusing on in the next years is on the education of fire safety engineers to the woey fire problem. We are used to scenarios of fires inside buildings. When it comes from the outside and when it comes from the vegetation, it's different. So we also have to be aware that we need more training on this, we need more education on this as well. So we should provide courses to professionals, we should implement uh when fire behavior modeling, for example, or we fire is in what we are teaching uh to fire safety engineers now because we are seeing that this is a problem, that it's gonna become more important and it's gonna worsen in the in the next years. So, yeah, I really encourage uh fire engineers to look into go into this issue and see where they can help out the communities that are located in in woe areas.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:Fantastic. And uh, for me, the first step is to record podcast episodes like this with people who are on the front line developing those tools and changing the fire profession. Pascal, thank you for uh great keynote at uh ESFS at Ljubljana. It was a pleasure. Uh, thank you for this interview. I think we were we had a chance to go deeper on some of the things. Uh, we went a little more shallow on some of the things, uh, but uh there will be papers, there will be other works coming from from you so people can build that the whole image. Uh and uh for me it was uh just just fun to have you in the podcast and discuss how the profession is changing, uh whether we like it or not. I think it's for the good.
Pascale Vacca:Yeah, thank you so much for having you, it was uh really, really nice to have this chat and yeah, to spread the word on uh Wi-Fi's and the Wi-Fi.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:And that's it, thank you for listening. I'm happy that Fire Engineer could have a work at every single stage of this uh preparedness process, uh including recovery, including communicating the solutions with other stakeholders. It's not just a one-off where just needed to run an FDS simulation at the start and then others carry on. I think support of fire engineers could be all along the process and it could be a continuous thing actually, because you do assessment, but then you have to do a reassessment every now and then. I also think fire engineers could perhaps expand their knowledge and uh and skills perhaps through mapping the terrains, mapping the fuels. So far the models take very basic assumptions for the fuels, but I think fire safety engineers could figure out like much better ways to map the fuels and use them as variables in their fire safety assessments. So I see a lot of work there. Of course, there's a ton of work in modeling space, far sight simulations, very interesting. Applying weather conditions to your simulations, oh that's extremely challenging, but yet very uh very interesting thing. Running those FTS in in terrain um simulations, perhaps using Lagrangian particles as your fuel source. Very interesting concept, very challenging, but uh yeah, it's it's something that can be done today already and can serve a purpose like like uh Pascal has shown. So uh outside of that, of course you have the entire evacuation uh layer which we have not even covered with Pascal. That's more in liking of a Woodity project. I had two episodes on that previously in the podcast. I've talked with Enrico, I talked with Harry and Nick from Hays Lab. So the a whole layer of research that's being done in how to safely evacuate communities, how to drive the traffic, how to make sure that people can escape when they need to, you know. Take all those puzzles uh together and you get some sort of uh wildfire acid, wildfire RCET analysis, which in the end is the core of fire safety engineering. With just one other word outside of that. This is exactly what we have been doing for buildings for years, and today the same philosophies could perhaps be extended to wildland urban interface areas. This is very exciting to me. I'm not sure if you're excited. I I wonder if you see opportunity for growth for fire safety engineering today. I mean, on one hand, it's not that we're gonna drop our jobs today and start doing those types of analysis, but if companies invest in this space, if products emerge which are easy to use, which are very straightforward to be applied, you know, someone just offers like a package from mapping the fuel till the final report and then assessment results and actionable advice. I am absolutely sure there will be uh communities that would be willing to pay for that as a product because people want to invest in their safety. Anyway, it's already a very long podcast episode. Thank you, Pascal, for this uh interview. It was a pleasure to have you in the Fire Science Show. Thank you for being here with me this Wednesday, and I hope to see you at the same place, same time next week. Thank you very much, cheers. Bye.