Wildfires, Preparedness, Arnsberg, Germany (2020-04-09)

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Activation date: 2020-04-09 <br>
Event type: Other <br>
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Activation reason: <br>
The scope of the service request EMSN-071 is to support the fire department and administration of the City of Arnsberg (Hochsauerland County, State North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany), with designing pre-event preventive measures, as well as incident coordination, in regards of wildfires that could hit this territory.More than 63% of the town’s area is covered by forest, including several large protected areas; forest plays an important economic role in both tourism and the timber-processing business. This is a cause of potential harm to city assets and population due to wildfire risk.Proposed solution and resultsThe Land Use / Land Cover (Product 3) and the Reference cartography (Product 4) are built to be used in the assessment of the Fire Hazard (Product 1) and Fire Exposure (Product 2).The Land Use / Land Cover (Product 3) is classified according to level 4 legend of standard Corine Land Cover. Digitalization was manual and classification was photo-interpreted using DOP orthophotos provided by Cologne Government Regional Office.The Reference cartography (Product 4) shows the main topographic, population, industry, transportation features and points of interest (i.e. hospitals, schools, type of industry or potential sites of industrial accidents). It is based on the integration of already existing sources from different producers and the update of the data to the moment of interest. They are all integrated in the EMSN schema geodatabase and updated by means of visual interpretation of reference pre-event imagery. Product 1 : Pre-disaster forest fire hazardIs the result of the integration of six variables that take into account the topography, the fire probability, the vegetation structure and the land use land cover at 5 meters resolution.Product 2: Pre-disaster forest fire exposureThe situation of people, infrastructure, housing, and other tangible human assets located within fire prone areas.The exposure shows the spatial representation and the hazard level assigned to each element of the population, buildings, points of interest, transportation network and associated features, land use land cover and Natura 2000 protected areas. All tables and figures are contained in the activation final report. <br>
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