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Evaluating urban fire vulnerability and accessibility to fire stations and hospitals in Austin, Texas [1]
['Akhil Mandalapu', 'Urban Information Lab', 'School Of Architecture', 'The University Of Texas At Austin', 'Austin', 'Texas', 'United States Of America', 'Kijin Seong', 'Junfeng Jiao']
Date: 2024-08
Anthropogenic climate change has increased the frequency and intensity of fires. Despite their widespread consequences, current research has largely overlooked urban fires and their associated vulnerability. This study seeks to identify patterns of fire vulnerability, map out areas with high fire vulnerability and limited access to fire stations and hospitals, and ultimately determine the factors contributing to increased fire incidents. Principal Component Analysis was used to develop a fire vulnerability index comprising variables capturing health status and socio-environmental factors. Enhanced 2-step floating catchment area (E2SFCA) analysis was conducted to determine relative accessibility to resources such as hospitals and fire stations. Ordinary least squares (OLS) regression and geographically weighted regression (GWR) were utilized to determine factors associated with higher fire incident counts. The results of the fire vulnerability analysis highlight areas of high fire vulnerability in the eastern periphery and the north-central parts of Austin. Moreover, the eastern periphery experiences decreased accessibility to fire stations and hospitals. Finally, the results of the GWR analysis highlight a varied negative relationship between health vulnerability and fire incidents and a positive relationship with socio-environmental vulnerability. The GWR model (R 2 : 0.332) was able to predict a greater extent of the variance compared to OLS (R 2 : 0.056). Results of this study underscore that areas with socio-environmental vulnerabilities are likely to face a higher number of fire incidents and have reduced access to hospitals and fire stations. These findings can inform public health officials, city planners, and emergency services departments in developing targeted strategies to mitigate the harm caused by fire incidents.
Funding: This research was supported by the National Science Foundation Grants (2133302 to JJ, 1952193 to JJ), the USDOT Center for Climate Smart Transportation (JJ) and the Good Systems at the University of Texas at Austin (JJ). The authors would like to acknowledge these supporters. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
This study seeks to address the following questions: (1) What are the spatial patterns of fire vulnerability within Austin, TX? (2) What is the spatial distribution of areas that have excess fire demand and reduced accessibility to fire stations and hospitals? and (3) What factors are associated with an increased number of fire incidents?
In recent years, much focus has been placed on assessing wildfire risk, especially in rural areas, due to climate change exacerbating existing wildfires. While there has been a significant emphasis on rural areas, it is crucial to highlight the importance of examining urban fire vulnerability and its impacts. Understanding fire vulnerability in urban settings is vital to informing fire stations’ planning and response strategies. This understanding is vital in rapidly expanding urban and suburban regions that frequently interface with wildfire-prone rural areas. This holistic approach ensures comprehensive fire preparedness and response strategies for evolving fire threats.
Urban areas around the world are growing at a rapid rate due to increased urbanization. This increased urbanization increases population density within city centers and suburbanization in the peripheral regions. Recently, this increased population density and increased intensity and frequency of fires have highlighted fire as a major hazard. Fire presents a significant risk to human health and safety, primarily through burns and the adverse effects of air pollution caused by smoke. However, the degree of individual vulnerability to fire and smoke-related air pollution can vary and be influenced by various socioeconomic and health factors. In dense urban areas, fires may affect many more individuals due to dense housing. In contrast, fires may burn longer in suburban areas due to closer proximity to the urban-wildland interface [ 1 , 2 ]. Fire requires rapid response from fire stations and an understanding of fire vulnerability due to reduced adaptive capacity.
Literature review
The warming climate due to anthropogenic climate change has led to the increased frequency, intensity, and duration of extreme weather events such as extreme heat and drought [3, 4]. Extreme weather conditions such as drought and heat increase the fire risk as these conditions create more fire-susceptible material [3, 5]. Several studies have noted this phenomenon, primarily focusing on wildfire risk [6, 7]. While much of the literature focuses on wildfire risk, many similar conditions, such as hot and dry weather and abundant flammable material, are still found in urban environments. Due to the increased population density of metropolitan areas, fires in these areas may pose more significant health and economic consequences.
It has been widely recognized that fires harm human health. Coming into contact with the fire itself may lead to burns and other trauma, and the smoke caused by fires can worsen air quality and exacerbate breathing problems. In recent years, large wildfires have significantly increased air pollution [8–10]. With climate change leading to rising temperatures, fires are becoming more frequent and increasingly intense [11]. Moreover, the burden of fires on air quality is projected to increase dramatically over the next century due to climate change [10].
This increased burden of fires on human health may lead to various detrimental health effects, such as respiratory symptoms, cardiovascular issues, and increased emergency room utilization [12]. These health effects may lead to acute symptoms such as heart failure, stroke, and difficulty breathing that may exacerbate chronic conditions [12]. As a result, individuals with chronic health conditions and limited socioeconomic resources are most vulnerable to the consequences of fire. Individuals in these areas need easily accessible fire stations and hospitals, which are essential for preventing fires from escalating and stabilizing patients.
Studies have investigated factors that contribute to vulnerability. However, most research in the field is focused on vulnerability due to wildfires or at the wildland-urban interface (WUI). Giovanni et al. investigated geological factors that may contribute to fire vulnerability. The study’s results focused on fuel characteristics and weather conditions as measurable quantities by which an area becomes increasingly at risk for wildfires [13]. However, a significant limitation of this approach is that it does not account for ignitions due to human activity. Moreover, weather patterns may be more unpredictable when addressing wildfire risk under climate change conditions. This uncertainty would make a reactive approach to protecting communities from fire ineffective compared to a proactive approach.
In contrast to a focus on wildfires and the environment, an emerging theme in the literature is investigating fire vulnerability on humans at different levels, ranging from global to individual buildings in various locales and socioeconomic contexts. Global approaches to determining fire vulnerability have been employed by Chuvieco et al., who focused on ecological parameters and house values at the wildland-urban interface [14]. While this broad approach allows for broader ecosystem conservation approaches, ecological modeling may be difficult for local jurisdictions to undertake, especially in areas that may be low-income or rapidly developing. These constraints at a local level are discussed by Twigg et al., whose work focuses on strategies to determine fire vulnerability in low-income and informal settlements [15]. Their work highlights a critical point in the discussion around fire vulnerability and resilience: the need for adequate data on fire incidence and causes and effects. This point highlights the need for fire vulnerability approaches to utilize publicly available data or establish systems to gather data, such as through local governmental institutions or the public.
Moreover, further work investigating fire vulnerability in low-income and informal settlements highlights the need to consider socioeconomic factors that augment fire vulnerability in addition to environmental factors [16]. Investigations of fire vulnerability in the wildland-urban interface in southern France focused on vegetation and housing density as risk factors and highlighted the need for accurate fire incident data [17]. The authors of this study concluded that isolated housing units in WUIs have the highest vulnerability. These findings may also have implications for more densely populated urban areas undergoing suburban sprawl and highlight the need to consider housing density in characterizing fire vulnerability. Other approaches to characterizing fire vulnerability have focused on high-rise buildings and densely populated urban areas. An example of this is the work of Masoumi et al., who focus on Zanjan, Iran, and utilize unmanned aerial vehicles in combination with data about the building characteristics [18]. While this approach provides rich data on fire vulnerability at a building level, this approach may not be feasible for much larger study areas or rapidly developing areas. Similarly, other works focus on buildings and specific building dynamics in older parts of cities in Portugal [19]. While this approach does not necessitate using unmanned aerial vehicles, it does require building inspections that may not scale to larger areas or areas that are still developing. Hermawan et al. used a GIS-based approach to characterize fire vulnerability in a densely populated district of Jakarta, Indonesia [20]. This approach integrated information about the environmental factors (road class, housing density, housing quality, population density) and social factors (percent of elderly and children, people with disabilities, and population sex ratio) and has been corroborated by other studies investigating fire vulnerability [21]. While this approach proves useful in developing a fire vulnerability index, it does not account for health risk factors that may predispose certain individuals to worse outcomes after a fire.
Recent studies have also investigated health risk factors associated with hospitalization and death due to residential fires. Ghassempour et al. investigate different types of fires and health outcomes from residential fires in Australia. Their study utilizes factors such as Age, Sex, Country of Birth, health comorbidities using the Charlson Comorbidity Index, socioeconomic factors through the Socio-Economic Index for Areas (SEIFA), and accessibility through the Accessibility/Remoteness Index for Australia (ARIA+) [22]. Findings from this study suggest that comorbidities and sustaining full burns were associated with higher costs and longer lengths of stay [22]. Similarly, for mortality, burns and smoke inhalation were critical factors along with ICU admission. This study contains many strengths, namely detailed information on the type of fire and endpoint information regarding health outcomes. Nevertheless, the replicability of this study’s design in contexts outside of Australia presents significant challenges. This is primarily because other jurisdictions may lack equivalents to ARIA+ or SEIFA or may not provide these indices at a geographic resolution finer than the national level. Moreover, calculating the Charlson Comorbidity Index requires detailed information about an individual’s health, which may not be possible at the population level. As such, a methodology that would be easily adaptable would require publicly available aggregate data.
Rappold et al. incorporate this adaptability by developing a community health vulnerability index using aggregated data. This index used health factors such as county prevalence of various health conditions and socioeconomic status indicators. Using this index, the study’s authors determined that more vulnerable counties were at a greater burden of wildfire smoke than less vulnerable counties [23]. While a wide variety of approaches are utilized to determine fire vulnerability, few approaches have integrated information about socioeconomic, environmental, and health factors and utilized methodologies that are accessible and scalable for local city planners.
Beyond characterizing fire vulnerability from a vulnerability perspective, another major challenge in facilitating resilience is improving accessibility to hospitals and fire stations, which act as resources to help cope with fires. Accessibility is another central theme within the literature. Shahparvari et al. use a location-allocation modeling approach to determine the ideal location for new fire stations. This approach utilizes information about road density, traffic light density, fire station distance, and fire incidents to determine new locations for fire stations to improve response time [24]. Other studies, such as by KC et al. and Mao et al., utilize two-step floating catchment area methods (2SFCA) [25, 26]. Both studies utilize historical fire incident data to determine accessibility to fire stations and highlight the 2SFCA methodology as a means of determining spatial accessibility to resources. Other studies in the literature build upon this methodology and use the enhanced 2SFCA (E2SFCA) approach, which accounts for distance decay and the behavior of individuals to potentially travel further for resources than what may be available in a particular catchment area [27–29]. This methodology has been utilized in a variety of different healthcare settings, such as measuring accessibility to COVID-19 testing resources [28], HIV testing and treatment services [30], and hospitals [29, 31]. These studies highlight the versatility of the E2SFCA methodology for determining accessibility to a variety of healthcare and fire relief resources. However, a significant limitation of these studies is that they focus on optimizing resource allocation without consideration of variance in fire vulnerability, which may lead to different demand characteristics in the future.
This paper develops a novel fire vulnerability index using publicly available data to capture information about health and socio-environmental factors at the census tract level. Additionally, this paper investigates accessibility to resources such as fire stations and hospitals that may relieve jurisdictions experiencing fires. Then, we suggest public policy and public health strategies to develop a resilient system to respond to fire incidents within urban environments.
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https://journals.plos.org/climate/article?id=10.1371/journal.pclm.0000448
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