Wildfire impacts on schools and hospitals following the 2018 California Camp Fire
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Wildfire impacts on schools and hospitals following the 2018 California Camp Fire Stefanie S. Schulze1 · Erica C. Fischer1 · Sara Hamideh2 · Hussam Mahmoud3 Received: 3 March 2020 / Accepted: 17 July 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Wildfire impacts on communities have become more pronounced in recent years as the intensity and frequency of wildfires have increased in densely populated areas of the USA. Communities located in the wildland–urban interface (WUI) neighboring high wildfire risk zones are at highest risk of damage to civil infrastructure. This paper summarizes an investigation on the 2018 Camp Fire impacts to schools and healthcare facilities in Paradise, CA. The paper demonstrates that interdisciplinary data collection methods can provide a comprehensive overview of school and hospital damage after a wildfire. Photographs, light detection and ranging (LiDAR) scans of damaged buildings, drone aerial images, and interviews with key school and healthcare stakeholders provided valuable information on the structural and nonstructural damages to infrastructure. Interviews also provided context to the impacts of infrastructure damage on the ability of education and healthcare facilities to operate or reopen following the fire. Nonstructural damage to schools and hospitals, such as damage to electrical systems or other utilities, significantly impacted the functionality of these facilities. Understanding the vulnerabilities of WUI communities to wildfire will help with disaster mitigation and recovery planning and aid in restoring critical services after the disaster. Keywords Wildland–urban interface · Wildfire · Reconnaissance · Community resilience · Interdisciplinary data
1 Introduction Wildfire impacts on communities have become more pronounced in recent years as their intensity and frequency have increased in densely populated areas of the USA. This increase in intensity and frequency is in part due to past wildfire suppression policies, which has led to increased fuel buildup in forests and wildlands, but is also largely * Stefanie S. Schulze [email protected] 1
School of Civil and Construction Engineering, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR, USA
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School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY, USA
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Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, USA
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Natural Hazards
a consequence of climate change (Schoennagel et al. 2017). Communities located in the wildland–urban interface (WUI) that neighbor high wildfire risk zones are at highest risk of human casualties, damage to civil infrastructure, and destruction of personal property (Radeloff et al. 2018). The WUI is an area where forested land borders and overlaps with infrastructure and development. Approximately one-third of all residents in the USA live in a WUI (Radeloff et al. 2018), and about 17.5 million people, or 6.3% of the US population, are affected by the annual threat of wildfire hazards (Thomas an
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