Abstract: |
Forest fires in Chile are a very major problem which affects both the environment and forestry work. Although Chile has a highly developed pre-suppression and fire-fighting system, over the last 15 years the effectiveness of our protection systems (measured by the average size of fires) has remained constant, while the budgets directed at protection have grown steadily, in particular in the private sector. The public sector, for its part, has been faced with difficult times, when budget assignation has been hindered by other national priorities and by the major difficulty of providing a foundation for applications for resources with no technical back-up. As a way of resolving this problem, a mathematical programming model was developed which represents the first step towards a planning scheme based on the economic analysis of fire management operations. The model determines the optimal size of the land-based fire-fighting team necessary at regional level, in order to adequately deal with fire problems which may occur within the area which the public sector protection programmes are responsible for. This model considers the analysis of coverage by land-based fire-fighting units using a cost of access scheme, where a vehicle moves over a surface which provides friction upon displacement. The friction surface is constructed on the basis of the regional road network and average speed of displacement per road-type. A number of locations for the land-based fire-fighting units are also considered as centres providing fire protection. Following this is a dynamic programming model which evaluates the different possible combinations of locations on the basis of the coverage which each location provides to the system, maximizing the surface area under coverage. The model developed is applied to the Forest Fire Protection Programme system operated by the National Forestry Corporation in region 8 in Chile. |
