Wildfires rampaging through rural communities are becoming a worryingly common sight thanks to climate change. A new mobile app could help guide those who are stuck onto a path to safety by providing simple directions like those given in maps applications.
In recent years, massive wildfires in the US, Australia and Greece have led to scores of deaths, and there is a growing scientific consensus that these disasters will become more frequent as the planet continues to warm.
鈥淚t鈥檚 a very serious problem,鈥� says Andreas Kamilaris at the CYENS Center of Excellence in Cyprus. 鈥淭he statistics show that casualties, as well as the area of land burned, around the world are increasing year by year.鈥�
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That prompted Kamilaris and his colleagues to build a mobile app that provides personalised evacuation routes to anyone caught in the path of a wildfire. The app connects over mobile networks to a web server running a fire simulation program, which uses publicly available data on geography, weather and vegetation type to predict the spread of fires at 15-minute intervals.
A fire management tool similar to those already in use lets local fire departments quickly tag when and where a fire starts, which is then used to generate real-time simulations. The app then uses the GPS location of each user to work out potential routes, selecting the best by weighing up how quickly each route gets them to safety against how close it takes them to the fire鈥檚 path. The best option is then displayed either as turn-by-turn directions or as a route overlaid on a map of the area.
In a small pilot at the Athalassa National Forest Park in Cyprus, all 17 people who took part successfully escaped a simulated fire. In questionnaires afterwards, they said the app was easy to use and that they would use it in a real wildfire.
But Ed Galea, a fire safety expert at the University of Greenwich in the UK, worries the route-planning algorithm the researchers use is too simple to deal with the complexities of a real-world evacuation, such as varying travel speeds or congestion on escape routes.
And while fire and evacuation models can help experts plan or respond to emergencies, he thinks even state-of-the-art systems have limitations that currently make them unsafe in the hands of untrained people. 鈥淭hat is not to say that the goal of having a personalised wildfire evacuation guidance system is not achievable,鈥� he says. 鈥淛ust not today.鈥�
Kamilaris admits the app still needs work and says the researchers plan to add features, like the ability to tailor travel speed and monitor users to prevent congestion, before testing again in more challenging scenarios.
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