Andy Elliott climbs a hill across a large blackened patch of heather land in the Dorset countryside where he and a fire crew put out a bushfire the previous week.
Charred branches reach up from the ground like antlers made of coal.
“Fire conditions across the UK are truly extraordinary, and particularly in south-east England,” Elliott said. “We would use the word extreme.”
The University of Exeter firefighter and wildfire researcher says that while the UK has always had many small bushfires, they are now seeing fires getting bigger and more intense, threatening lives and homes.
Elliott bends down to put a soil moisture meter on the ground and reaches into the brush to pick up crunchy leaves and brambles that he places in a bag. These samples will be taken to a university lab where they will be ignited under controlled conditions to measure how flammable they are and how well they could fuel a fire.
It’s all part of a project involving universities and researchers across the UK to adapt a national wildfire danger classification system based on the Canadian wildfire danger classification system.
LOOK | How a Canadian system is helping UK wildfire investigators:
UK researchers create wildfire classification system using Canadian model
Amid record temperatures and destructive wildfires this summer, UK researchers are developing a national wildfire danger rating system based on a Canadian model. Scientists in Canada hope the research could also help improve the decades-old system at home.
UK teams hope to create a unique system
“The UK does not officially have a fire hazard classification system as such,” Elliott said.
“It’s very ad hoc. It’s up to local fire and rescue services to post safety messages, and local authorities will post safety messages, but there’s no real co-ordination.”
Elliott and teams working across the country hope to change that by adopting the Canadian system to create a single source of high-quality information for fire officials to use to plan and warn the public.
Because there are such a diverse number of ecosystems in the UK, teams from different areas had to be split up to do the fieldwork.
Researcher and firefighter Andy Elliott collects samples of dry moorland vegetation. The samples will be burned to measure how much they could fuel a wildfire, allowing researchers to determine fire danger levels. (Lauren Sproule/CBC)
“Fuels are different in the UK. We recognize that they change with latitude,” Elliott said.
“So all of that is being looked at and measured right now so that we can give a system that will hopefully be publicly available, that will hopefully be used by emergency responders.”
Canada’s model
For about a century, researchers and public safety workers in Canada developed various measures and scales to anticipate the degree of wildfire risk. But it was in 1968 that Canada first established its national Canadian wildfire danger classification system.
Mike Wotton, a research scientist with the Canadian Forest Service and professor of forestry at the University of Toronto, is one of the Canadians helping UK researchers modify their country’s model.
Mike Wotton, a research scientist with the Canadian Forest Service, is working with UK researchers as they adapt Canada’s wildfire danger system to their own country. (Derek Hooper/CBC)
“It’s the common tool that’s used across Canada day in and day out during the fire season to give fire managers an idea of what the situation is in their forests, basically, in terms of the possibility of cause a fire,” he said.
The model leverages a series of metrics to predict fire risk, which is then shared with fire and emergency officials.
“Things like the dryness of the forest fuels, how quickly the fires will spread, what the intensity or size of the flame would be expected in any fire that started,” Wotton said.
Canadians may be familiar with the front-end public information end of the system. Anyone who drives into forested areas will have seen the large signs with an arrow indicating the current level of fire danger.
The UK is not the first country to look at the Canadian model to create its own early warning system, and Wotton said it is well known globally.
“We’ve worked a lot with New Zealand and Indonesia, Malaysia… We’re working quite closely with the Swiss right now to help them adapt the system.”
Many Canadians only know the front end of the Canadian wildfire danger classification system, like this billboard in Tweed Township, Ontario, but there’s a lot of science behind the road signs that communicate fire risk to the public. (Submitted by Mike Wotton)
Opportunity to upgrade the Canadian system
The UK’s work to specialize its fire danger system may also benefit Canadian researchers, particularly some work done by Elliott on heathlands where the terrain and vegetation are similar to the bushland of Nova Scotia and Newfoundland and labrador
“Fire management agencies are challenged to predict fire,” Wotton said. “Hopefully we can take some of what they learn and apply it here to some types of fuel that we haven’t been able to do our own combustion or experimental research on.”
He said the UK team’s innovations have also provided an opportunity to update the Canadian system, which has been relatively unchanged for the past 50 years.
“An update is long overdue to incorporate some of the new things we understand about fire science, building a more flexible system,” he said.
“I’m hoping that some of the things we see this group in the UK doing well will give us some ideas about where we can take the system here in Canada as well.”
Wotton is full of praise for the way the UK teams are adapting the system and said he was impressed with the robust nature of their testing and fieldwork.
“They’re doing it well and not just doing academic science, but they’re going out and burning across the country, linking up with partners on the ground who are fire managers so they can build the right tools to help first responders.” .
A section of burnt brush is seen in July after a wildfire broke out in Winfrith Heath, Dorset. The fire followed months of drought and days of record-breaking heat. (Lauren Sproule/CBC)
Essence Speed
For Elliott, who wears both the hat of an investigator and a fire marshal, the completion of a national system can’t come soon enough.
“These are landscapes that I’ve lived my whole life growing up and absolutely love, and to see them destroyed by fire is heartbreaking,” Elliott said. “I take comfort in the fact that we’re investigating this and we’re moving forward.”
The project has another year of research and data collection before a national system can be adopted, he says.
LOOK | London houses destroyed by bushfires:
Forest fires destroy dozens of properties in the village on the outskirts of London
Bushfires forced residents of Wennington, a town on the outskirts of London, to evacuate as their properties were destroyed.
But given July’s record temperatures, which topped 40C for the first time in the country’s history, and the 41 homes in London that were subsequently destroyed by wildfire, Elliott believes the system will become a important tool
“The pace of change may have surprised some of us, especially with recent events, but we are moving in the right direction and the fire hazard classification system will really help to understand that.”