RAPID/Collaborative Research: Investigation of 2021 Marshall Fire Impacts on Physical Infrastructure and Decision-Making Processes

The Marshall Fire on December 30, 2021 greatly impacted the rapidly developing communities of Louisville, Superior, and unincorporated Boulder County. Boulder County adopted voluntary wildfire mitigation in 2011 and spent considerable funds on educating the public about the risks of wildfires. The fire impacted regions with a mixture of older homes (e.g., Original town Superior) and modern homes (built within the last 10-20-years).

There is a critical gap in knowledge on how to design, build, and maintain more resilient communities, while balancing the demands of the present with the climate and infrastructure demands of the future. This Grant for Rapid Response Research (RAPID) collaborative project is led by structural, geotechnical, construction, and lifeline engineers, many of whom are cross-trained in social science and policy, to investigate damage patterns to physical infrastructure (buildings, foundations, and retaining structures), and the influence of that damage on decision-making processes for planning and reconstruction.

More immediately, the results of this research will inform policies on building regulations in wildland urban interface (WUI) communities.

This research will quantify the impact of building characteristics (year built, building and façade materials, foundation type and characteristics, proximity of other homes, presence/condition of fences or decks, proximity to vegetation) on housing survivability and re-occupancy in wildfires within grassland landscapes. Using the damage patterns and mechanistic behavior of the homes and their various structural components along with understanding of heat transfer and fire spread within a community, the PIs will develop a methodology to quantify exposure temperatures and duration.

This data will be used to develop heat maps of the City of Louisville as a method to portray fire intensity throughout the town. These maps can be used by future research teams for benchmarking fire simulations and empirically-designed or validated predictive models. The research will also characterize the jurisdictional reconstruction decision-making processes and tradeoffs in the early post-disaster reconstruction phase.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.