Cal Poly Wildland-Urban Interface Institute Forges Ahead
In early February, a series of fires swept through Chile that would become the deadliest in the country’s history. The fires killed 132 and affected more than 7,000 people in Quilpué City, Marga Marga Province and more in neighboring areas.
As stories of the tragedy spread across the nation, Cal Poly Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) Fire Institute Director Frank Frievalt sat some nearly 6,000 miles away looking in wonder at a photo that that was splashed across the front page of national newspapers. A single community of about 70 homes sat unscathed among the ashes. “I couldn’t stop looking at the picture,” said Frievalt. “This is the outcome that we should be working toward making happen intentionally; this is what ‘right’ looks like.”
Stories reported at the time hinted that mitigation work done prior to the fires led to the miraculous outcome of the Botania neighborhood of Quilpué, Chile. So, as the ashes still smoldered, Frievalt convened a group of six people including Cal Poly Architecture Professor Margot McDonald to journey there to further examine the outcome.
“The best interpretation of science is telling us that somewhere in the very near future, based on the quantity of greenhouse gasses already in the atmosphere today, we can expect five decades of average acreage loss from wildfires that will be 200-300% more than we experienced in 2020” Frievalt said. “The countdown clock is ticking.”
Frievalt hoped, like others, that the Botania neighborhood’s survival would in some way indicate replicable preventative measures that could be implemented in California and beyond.
Developing mitigation methods yielding the Quilpué outcome would help avert another kind of looming global crisis: the inability of insurance companies to price the expanding risks associated with growing devastation from wildfires occurring globally. If a concrete way to lessen the risks is not found, people will increasingly have difficulty securing affordable insurance policies, leading to what Frievalt sees as a looming financial catastrophe.
“At the WUI Fire Institute, we are bringing to bear a transdisciplinary team of researchers from Cal Poly’s six colleges figuring out how we can help quantify the risks at the parcel level, on the ground, explain the loss sequence of conflagration, and then bring mitigations that will disrupt that loss sequence in a way that is recognizable to the insurance industry,” he said. “And then, we will have aligned the science, the mitigations, and the residual risk necessary for pricing that risk.”
Ultimately, the trip to Chile didn’t reveal a clear solution for mitigation efforts. “The community did not survive based on mitigations alone,” Frievalt said. “It was a combination of factors, including a well-trained community who was prepared to respond to such situations.”
Frievalt said that in the aftermath of the fire it was clear that there were nearly 20 ignition points that would have kept burning and spread to nearby homes if people in the neighborhood hadn’t stopped the flames using water packs strapped to their backs that they had been taught to use through a community program prior to the fire. “At that point, there were no firefighting resources there, just the people living in those homes.” Other factors may have also played a part, including the topography of the surrounding area and micro-weather induced, ironically, by the intensity and directionality of the fire.
“We didn’t find a silver bullet, but the trip did reaffirm that the strategy we are using to disrupt fire pathways through a combination of efforts is a modeling structure that will work,” Frievalt said. “I think many in the world are still in the grieving process of acknowledging that the future is not what we thought it would be. But we have to keep moving forward.”
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