Abstract: |
The circumstances which concur when a fire occurs cause situations of serious risk, catastrophe or public calamity, making fire a risk in general which should be covered under civil protection planning. It is considered as such under the Spanish Civil Protection Basic Regulations which establish that the risk of forest fires should be dealt with through special plans in regional areas which so require them. Considering the terms under which the basic directive defines the basic elements for planning, a proposal for methodology is presented which firstly assesses the vulnerability - or what amounts to the same thing -the degree of loss or damage which may be suffered as the result of a forest fire by the population, property and the environment and secondly assigns the level of potential gravity of a fire for each area of the region, depending on the intrinsic and extrinsic elements of the forest ecosystem, concerning available fire prevention resources. The analysis of regional distribution of vulnerability, the level of potential gravity of fires, and the elements which make these up will make possible adequate prevention measures – feasibility, fuel handling, and handling of other infrastructures and equipment – in order to be able to bring areas with a high potential for the gravity of forest fires down to lower levels of potential gravity. |
