Wildfire Patterns in Southeastern New Mexico: A Decision Aid for a Volunteer Fire Department

Wildfire Patterns in Southeastern New Mexico: A Decision Aid for a Volunteer Fire Department

Richard Rush, Kyle Jacobs, and Angel Lucero.

Melrose High School, Melrose, New Mexico

This team was chosen as second round finalists in our 19th annual awards ceremony. They were also give the Best Agent Based Model award by Irene Lee, from Project GUTS and Santa Fe Institute. They are beginning programmers who created a community friendly program tested by their local fire department.

Our project predicted the spread and control of wildfires. We predicted a fire’s behavior under a certain set of circumstances. As wind, terrain, vegetation, man made obstacles, and moisture were all factors, we included them in our code. We used StarLogo TNG as our computing language because it is easy to program in and it is easier to control terrain variables than in other programs.

In our region of New Mexico on the Llano Estacado, we rely on volunteer firefighters to control any wildfires, and this year, due to a wet summer and other favorable circumstances, we have grown a lot of grass. This winter the grass will die and dry out and become extremely flammable. A fire in our area can start due to various circumstances, such as lighting strikes, old electrical wires rubbing, a cigarette thrown out of a window, or someone driving a vehicle through tall grass. Any of these things can happen at any given time, and with the right conditions, a fire can take off. Fire requires three things to burn: fuel, heat, and oxygen. If any one of these things is removed, the fire goes out. Firefighters do their best to remove any one of these three things to control a fire. Firefighters will use several methods to accomplish this, such as back burning, smothering the fire with water or foam, and even setting off explosives to use the oxygen (oil well fires).

In our program we simulated a situation and “started a fire/” We incorporated the variables of the situation and determined where a fire will tend to move, where fire breaks should be placed, and where the limited number of firefighting units should be placed. With our program we simulated real life scenarios to help the firefighters in our area.

Our team has conducted research, mainly on the Internet, to learn more about the properties of fire. We conducted interviews with the volunteer fire departments in our area.” The PDF for team 71's final report can be found at http://challenge.nm.org/finalreports/.