Conference: Fire Resilience of Physical Civil Infrastructure; Reston, Virginia; Fall 2024

Fires in the United States result in annual costs in the billions of dollars, including direct property losses, indirect losses from business interruptions, and losses from injuries and deaths. The United States has witnessed the devastating impacts of wildfires on communities. Wildfire activity (the number of fire days, intensity, and impacts) has increased rapidly in recent decades, yet it is projected to increase even further due to climate change and anthropogenic activities, especially in wildland-urban interface (WUI) areas where people live.

Structure fires have provided the engineering community with valuable insights into the behavior and impact of fires and fire safety design of civil infrastructure. Recently, experts in resilient fire design of civil infrastructure have applied their knowledge of fire safety design to understand and mitigate wildfire impacts to communities within the WUI.

This award will support an engineering workshop to gather key experts from academe, industry, government agencies, and national laboratories within the United States in the field of resilient fire design of civil infrastructure to (1) share perspectives on available resources and facilities for experimental fire testing; (2) identify research needs, gaps, and challenges facing fire resilience of civil infrastructure, considering the emergence of new structural materials, increased wildfire demands due to climate change, and other emerging stressors; and (3) formulate a basic research and education agenda for fire resilience of physical civil infrastructure.

The workshop will be held for two days in Fall 2024 at the American Society of Civil Engineers headquarters in Reston, Virginia. The workshop will identify fundamental research needs in achieving fire resilience of civil infrastructure for the following topics: (1) impacts of structural (or internal) fires on buildings and structures; (2) impacts of WUI (or external) fires on buildings and structures, including residential construction; (3) impacts of fires on transportation structures (excluding pavements); (4) impacts of fires on utilities; and (5) impacts of fires on geotechnical failures.

For these topics, the workshop discussions will be structured to identify needs in four areas: in-field investigations, experimental research, numerical/analytical research, and educational approaches. The ideas presented by the speakers and generated from the discussion sessions will be summarized in a final report and published through the Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure (NHERI) Data Depot (https://www.DesignSafe-ci.org).

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.