A/Student Peter Middleton has published two reports this month. The first is a literature review on the public information in the response phase of emergency management. The scope of the literature reviewed is based on four individual themes and will investigate the current state of practice in public information. The review informs the report for the Tasmania Fire Service (TFS) and State Emergency Service (SES) (final product) for the unit EMG505 – Work Based Project for the qualification of Master of Emergency Management at Charles Sturt University.
Associate student Greg Penney also has two papers for his project,Through the flames – quantitative analysis of strategic and tactical wildfire suppression project. The first, authored alongside Daryoush Habibi, Marcus Cattani and Murray Carter and published in Fire, calculates the critical water flow rates for wildfire suppression. The paper takes an in-depth look at predicting water suppression requirements, which in the past have had a focus within urban environments, rather than wildfire suppression. The paper provides guidance for incident controllers in relation to critical water flow rates required to extinguish large wildfire across a wide range of forest fuel loads, fire weather and active fire front depths.The results highlight the limitations of offensive wildfire suppression involving direct head fire attacks by appliances once wildfires attain a quasi-steady state in forest fuels.
Greg's second paper was authored with Steven Richardson and also appears in Fire. The paper on the modelling of radiant heat flux and rate of spread of wildfire within the urban environmentproposes two new models to address this issue and utilises two case studies for comparison against existing approaches. The findings are significant as this is the first study to analyse these factors from a fire engineering perspective, and to demonstrate that the use of landscape scale or siege wildfire models may not be appropriate within the urban context.