Fire

The article critically examines the role of Volunteer Fire Brigades (VFB) from the Nowy Targ municipality during the large-scale rural fire that affected Nowa Biała in June 2021. The study combines official post-incident operational documentation, institutional reports and empirical survey data collected from 100 volunteer firefighters representing 22 VFB units and 50 residents of Nowa Biała. The findings show that the local VFB played a first-line role during the initial response: the first Nowa Biała VFB unit arrived three minutes after notification, while the first State Fire Service (PSP) resources arrived 16 min after dispatch. Nevertheless, rapid local mobilisation did not prevent extensive losses because the rate of fire propagation rapidly exceeded the suppression capacity available during the initial phase. At the peak of the incident, approximately one additional building became involved every two minutes. The response was further constrained by dense development, strong and variable wind, very high water demand, communication problems, restricted access for heavy vehicles and aerial appliances, and pressure generated by distressed residents. Survey results confirm a very high assessment of VFB performance and interagency cooperation, while also highlighting the important role of volunteer firefighters in post-fire assistance and recovery. The paper concludes with recommendations concerning reinforced initial resource mobilisation, water supply, communication resilience, joint exercises, personnel readiness, digital warning tools and psychosocial support for responders.

Forest fires are becoming increasingly complex due to climate change and growing anthropogenic pressures, increasing the need for reliable, transparent, and interpretable spatial risk assessment approaches. This study develops a comparative spatial decision-support framework for forest fire risk assessment and landscape planning in Antalya Province, Türkiye. Forest fire risk factors were identified through the Delphi technique, and their relative importance was determined using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Best–Worst Method (BWM), with criterion priorities integrated through BORDA aggregation. Expert-based risk maps were generated using Geographic Information System (GIS)-based Weighted Overlay and Map Algebra methods. In parallel, Random Forest (RF) and Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) models were applied for data-driven risk prediction, while SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) analysis was used to interpret model outputs. The expert-driven and data-driven approaches were developed separately and compared in terms of variable importance and spatial risk patterns. The results revealed partial agreement between the two approaches in identifying key risk factors, alongside differences in variable rankings and spatial distributions. Under nested spatial block cross-validation, RF and XGBoost achieved mean ROC-AUC values of 0.9066 and 0.9129, respectively. The proposed framework supports evidence-based forest fire risk management and landscape planning.

This study investigates the smoke spread characteristics and occupant evacuation safety of a 15 MW battery electric vehicle (BEV) fire in a 1.5 km small-bore single-lane road tunnel. Owing to its minimized cross-section (a single 3.0 m lane within a 3.7 m inner diameter), no fire protection or evacuation facilities can be accommodated, and its fire safety therefore requires performance-based verification. Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS) was used to simulate the fire under different longitudinal ventilation velocities, and the smoke temperature, visibility and CO concentration were examined. Based on these indices, the available safe egress time (ASET) was determined, while the required safe egress time (RSET) was obtained from Pathfinder evacuation simulations for a worst-case congestion scenario involving 420 occupants, so as to evaluate whether the evacuation distance of the 1.5 km tunnel is adequate. The results show that under natural ventilation, the upstream section 645–750 m violates the RSET < ASET criterion; under 1 m/s longitudinal ventilation, the failure zone shrinks to 740–750 m; at 2 m/s and 3 m/s, the upstream region remains tenable throughout the 900 s simulation and all occupants can evacuate safely. A longitudinal ventilation velocity of at least 2 m/s is therefore required to ensure safe upstream evacuation in this tunnel. The conclusions are drawn for the present worst-case configuration and are intended for the pre-construction performance-based verification of similar single-lane tunnels without evacuation facilities.