Site Selection of Fire Stations in Large Cities Based on Actual Spatiotemporal Demands: A Case Study of Nanjing City

The rapid expansion of cities brings in new challenges for the urban firefighting security, while the increasing fire frequency poses serious threats to the life, property, and safety of individuals living in cities. Firefighting in cities is a challenging task, and the optimal spatial arrangement of fire stations is critical to firefighting security. However, existing researches lack any consideration of the negative effects of the spatial randomness of fire outbreaks and delayed response time due to traffic jams upon the site selection. Based on the set cover location model integrated with the spatiotemporal big data, this paper combines the fire outbreak point with the traffic situation. The presented site selection strategy manages to ensure the arrival of the firefighting task force at random simulated fire outbreak points within the required time, under the constraints of the actual city planning and traffic situation. Taking Nanjing city as an example, this paper collects multi-source big data for the comprehensive analysis, including the full data of the fire outbreak history from June 2014 to June 2018, the traffic jam data based on the Amap, and the investigation data of the firefighting facilities in Nanjing. The regularity behind fire outbreaks is analyzed, the factors related to fire risks are identified, and the risk score is calculated. The previous fire outbreak points are put through the clustering analysis, the spatial distribution probability at points in each cluster is calculated according to the clustering score, and the random fire outbreak points are generated via the Monte Carlo simulation. Meanwhile, the objective emergency response time is set as five minutes. The average vehicle speed for each road in the urban area is calculated, and the actual traffic network model is built to compute the travel time from massive randomly-distributed simulated fire points. The problem is solved by making the travel time for all simulated demand points below five minutes. At last, the site selection result based on our model is adjusted and validated, according to the planned land use. The presented method incorporates the view of the spatiotemporal big data and provides a new idea and technical method for the modification and efficiency improvement of the fire station site selection model, contributing to a service cover ratio increase from 58% to 90%.

Should We Expect a Disastrous Fire Accident in an Urban Road Tunnel? Literature Data Review and a Case Study for Selected Tunnels in Poland

Urban road tunnels are a reasonable remedy for inconvenience due to congested road traffic. However, they bring specific threats, especially those related to the possibility of fire outbreak. This work is a case study for selected urban road tunnels. Considering tunnel specificity, road traffic intensity, and structure and based on the literature data for vehicle fire probability, the chances of a fire accident were estimated for selected tunnels in Poland. It was shown that low power tunnel fires could be expected in the 10–20-year time horizon. Although such threats cannot be disregarded, tunnel systems are designed to cope with them. The chances of a disastrous fire accident were estimated as well. Such events can occur when an HGV with flammable goods or a tanker are involved. Such accidents are fortunately very rare, but, on the other hand, that is the reason why the available data are scanty and burdened with high uncertainty. Therefore, a discussion on the reliability of the obtained results is also provided.

Climate Change Adaptation in Akropong, Ghana: Experiences of Female Smallholder Farmers

This article examines smallholder women farmers’ awareness of climatic factors and the adaptation strategies to climate change events and how they influence their farming methods. A household survey was conducted on 50 smallholder women farmers at Akropong in the Nkoranza South Municipality in the forest-savannah transition zone of Ghana. The survey was complemented with in-depth and semi-structured interviews. The findings revealed that women farmers use multiple adaptation strategies such as creating fire belts to prevent fire outbreak in the dry season, creating channels on their farmland to prevent erosion, planting crops that can withstand excessive rain and drought and mixed cropping to overcome livelihood challenges resulting from climatic factors. The article therefore argues for an in-depth research and intensive education as a targeted intervention in understanding climate change and training women smallholder farmers on adaptation strategies to overcome climatic elements affecting farming and food production which serve as their main livelihood.

Design and development of RFID based Multi-User Smart Energy Distribution System at Sunyani Technical University, Ghana

In Ghana families living in large and compound houses desire to have separate energy meters from other occupants. This is because individuals cannot monitor and control the energy consumption of other tenants and results in misunderstanding in energy bill sharing, overcrowding of energy meters on the wall of a building and likelihood of fire outbreak. It is therefore expedient to have a very accurate, efficient and peaceful means of delivering electrical energy to multiple users within a household with just a single energy meter and this has necessitated the introduction of Smart Multi-user Energy Distribution Meter (SEDS). In this paper microcontroller based smart electrical distribution switch that has the capability of allocating independent energy units to several users in a household is proposed. Experiment was done by assigning Energy units of 4kWh, 8kWh and 6kWh to three logging points on the SEDS device representing three different users. A load of 100W was connected representing the consumption of individual user. The results indicate that the rate of consumption is dependent on the total load connected. The SEDS device has different switches allocated to each user which monitor the consumption rate of the user and automatically isolate a user when power gets exhausted which serve the same purpose as several users having different energy meters. However, individual consumption can be monitored and controlled by the user.

Smart Smoke Detector

In the past few decades many studies and researches have taken place in order to improve security systems and to increase their level of protection in different fields. One of the major problems that security must deal with is the fire outbreak that can happen in everywhere including houses, schools, factories and many other places, and to avoid that or to minimize the damage caused by fire outbreak an IoT technology is used to control such a kind of risk. IoT is a modern system that consist of sensors and switches connected. In this project we will use temperature sensor known as (Flame sensor) with Arduino device to detect fire outbreak and to measure the amount of heat intensity generated by a fire outbreak or in a specific location in our house, offices and other places. It sometimes takes too much time for the fire station to reach to the fire outbreak location and works on extinguish the fire and so these sensors will work as an early alarm system which will send a notification to our mobile phones if any fire outbreak occurred to let us know the situation clearly and before it’s too late, we act to avoid significant damage in case the fire outbreak was observed after a long time from its outbreak.

Early Fire Detection System in Tanzania Markets

Application of wireless sensor networks (WSN) and Internet of Things (IoT) used to provide real-time monitoring of fire outbreak in markets. The system integrates three subsystems namely; sensing subsystem which uses multiple sensors for detecting fire outbreaks. Data processing subsystem which collects data from the sensing subsystem through Xbee, analyses, and uploads data to the cloud. If values exceed the sensor threshold, an alarm is triggered and notification is sent to stakeholders via mobile application subsystem. The integration between sensing, data processing, and mobile application subsystems pave a new way for the mitigation of fire outbreaks at its early stage.

Detection of forest fires outbreaks by dynamic fuzzy logic controller

The use of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) and the Internet of things to detect forest fire outbreaks may help to reduce the response time and avoid natural disasters. This work proposes the deployment of WSN to enhance the real-time monitoring of dynamic variables such as polluting gases, temperature or the presence of fire flames by infrared. In addition, the activation of forest fire alerts if environmental status may involve evidence of a recent fire outbreak. A fuzzy-based controller is implemented to manage the uncertainty related to estimating forest fire occurrence and dynamic update of fuzzy sets is developed to distinguish usual and unusual environmental conditions of every monitored forest area. Merkle trees, AES and hash functions are considered to protect the integrity of environmental data.

Effect of Elevated Temperature on Compressive Strength and Physical Properties of Neem Seed Husk Ash Concrete

High temperature rise mostly caused by a fire outbreak is currently becoming a threat that endangers concrete’s structural performance for buildings and the safety of occupants. The behavior of concrete after fire subjection has been of much interest for the structural materials design purposes. This study investigated the physical properties and the compressive strength of M25 concrete incorporating Neem Seed Husk Ash (NSHA), exposed to and through targeted different levels of temperature (200 °C to 800 °C) for a period of three hours in an electric furnace. The NSHA was produced by calcining neem seed husks at 800 °C for six hours and then sieved through the 125 μm sieve. Different amounts of NSHA were investigated while considering the plain concrete as the control sample. 150 concrete cubes of 150 mm sizes were cast and properly cured for 7 and 28 days. The experimental results show that the compressive strength of the 5% NSHA concrete exposed to temperatures up to 400 °C is 21.3% and 23.8% better than the normal concrete at 7 and 28 curing days, respectively. Surface cracks and spalling are noticeable at 600 °C and 800 °C for all samples considered in this study.

A Study on Analyzing the Operation Time of the Sprinkler Head near the Beam with Fire Simulation

In this study, the dangers surrounding vehicular fires were identified by means of statistical analysis of the national fire information system. The analysis was conducted on the operation time of the sprinkler fire extinguisher, which plays the most essential role during the initial fire extinguishing attempt, in case of a fire outbreak. A simulation was created using the application guidelines pertaining to a sprinkler head located close to a beam as provided in NFSC 103. The operation time of the sprinkler head was analyzed for the case of a parking lot fire where a fan was operated. Fire Dynamics Simulator was used as the simulation program. If the revised guidelines were applied to thesimulation, the sprinkler head located directly above the fire source was activated approximately 1 minin advance compared to the sprinkler head operating under current standards. Therefore, it was found that the revised guidelines were suitable and aided in early fire extinguishing attempts. In the case where a fan was operated along with the detector, during the outbreak of a fire, it was found that the operation of the sprinkler head located directly above the fire was delayed by two or more minutes compared to the simulated case where no fan was operated.