Locating casualties in large forest fires

Endorsed by
Motivation

Limited ability to identify the location of injured/ trapped/ deceased casualties in large forest fires.

Potential Solutions
Following solutions could be addressing this gap.

Large such as forest fires may touch a large territory, increasing the difficulty to locate casualties. Real time Location of potential casualties is particularly important for fast kinetics hazards such as forest fires. Most often, forest fires happen in low density area (inhabitants, traffic), but also affect wildland-urban interface. Typical technologies for location of casualties like thermal imaging or canine search may not be used in the case of forest fires. Cell-phone based technology seems to be most useful (either using specific apps or signals from cell-phones) in this context, but are not functioning if there is no cellular coverage.

References in the literature: The ability to locate casualties on a crisis scene is recognised and documented, but not in the specific case of forest fires.

Rationale & related CM function(s)

Inter-agency surveillance and investigation of an area affected by a large forest fire need to be enhanced by a capacity to identify and locate casualties.
Human and sensor data from the field and from airborne platforms will facilitate the identification and location of casualties in large forest fires.
Novel data collection tools, integrated to the crisis communications and information management system, may allow to identify and locate casualties in large forest fires.
Standing opportunities for crowd sourcing will facilitate communications by people trapped or injured by a large forest fire.
eu Portfolio of Solutions web site has been initially developed in the scope of DRIVER+ project. Today, the service is managed by AIT Austrian Institute of Technology GmbH., for the benefit of the European Management. PoS is endorsed and supported by the Disaster Competence Network Austria (DCNA) as well as by the STAMINA and TeamAware H2020 projects.