Disaster Management: Initiating Emergency Response for Forest Fires

When a forest fire occurs, to cope with this disaster a range of facilities are needed. Although these facilities may be efficient, their usages should be coordinated according to the requirements needed for a particular forest fire. Initiating firefighting activities on time, especially arrival of fire water tender and the ground team onto fire areas in critical response time is crucial for effective fighting against forest fires. Additionally, when multiple fires occur during a dry season, the response planning, and coordination become vital to fighting fires. Therefore, emergency response planning/coordination gains paramount importance while firefighting. This study focuses on one of the most important aspect of the wildfire response phase: initial emergency response in fixed regional forest directorates and airports. In this study, a heuristic methodology is proposed to solve this problem with real map data by using Network Analyst toolbox under ArcGIS program, which is used to determine optimum route that minimize arrival time to forest fires. To show the applicability of the proposed methodology, forest fire data that was collected in Turkey is used.