Locating casualties in large forest fires
Limited ability to identify the location of injured/ trapped/ deceased casualties in large forest fires.
Potential Solutions
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)
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. |