Probabilistic Risk Analysis of Colorado Wildfires

In recent years, Colorado, among other states, has seen rapid urban expansion.
Termed wildland-urban interfaces, or WUIs, these areas are particularly vulnerable
to hazards such as landslides, avalanches, and wildfires. This danger has motivated
new risk analysis of natural disasters and investigations into preventative measures.
The work in this paper is primarily intended to be a proof of concept for combining
Markov models, decision analysis, and probabilistic risk analysis to simulate
wildfire propagation, assess damages, and guide policy. We present a framework
for assessing the effectiveness of pre-event mitigation actions in reducing wildfire
risk in the WUI. We build and test a stochastic wildfire propagation and loss
model on different scenarios, where each scenario is a different type of communitywide
pre-event mitigation action as specified by the International Wildland Urban
Interface Codes (IWUIC). The results give the expected damages from wildfire
events in each scenario. We approximate the costs associated with each scenario
and use decision analysis to find the optimal implementation of the IWUIC for the
community in question. In this way, we are able to assess the value of pre-event
wildfire mitigation in the wildland-urban interface.