Does it pay to invest in better suppression resources?: policy analysis of alternative scenarios with simulation

Abstract

Rekindles (RKD) and false alarms (FA) are unusually high in the Portuguese wildfire management system. Together they represent a high burden on suppression resources in particular, and fire management resources in general. Indeed, e.g., during 2010, according to data provided by the Portuguese Institute for Nature Conservation and Biodiversity (ICNF), in 20,049 occurrences that the suppression system handled in the summer, 12.5% were FA and 15.0% were RKD. During the fire season, it is usual to have large usage of suppression resources to combat wildfires and on peak days, firefighters are in a tight spot due to the pressure to move incessantly from one fire to the next one. In such occasions the system may not be able to effectively meet the needs, getting out of control. If there are fires waiting to be fought, suppression crews are pressured to prematurely abandon mop-up operations (moving towards the initial attack of new fires), without the needed time to use the appropriate tools to effectively carry out mop-up. When one of these fires with a bad mop-up rekindles, it is one more to join the other new ignitions or primary fires, and they are generally more aggressive than the latter. We first developed a discrete-event simulation model of a wildfire suppression system, designed to analyze the joint impact of primary fires, RKD and FA on the system performance. Recently (unpublished), we explicitly closed the causal loop between primary fires and RKD, and modeled the suppression resources in greater detail, by distinguishing standard crews of volunteer firefighters (with and without training) from expert crews of professional firefighters. Using a Portuguese district as case study, with a set of scenarios, we analyzed the cost-effectiveness of investing in the training of standard and/or expert crews, considering different dispatch policies. We found that reducing FA and RKD to benchmark values would significantly reduce pressure on firefighting teams, enabling more effective suppression operations, and that it pays to invest in better suppression resources.