Improving fire resistance of data monitoring equipment in wildland and wildland-urban interface fires

Abstract

The 2019–2020 Black Summer fire season highlighted the vulnerability of water monitoring sites, causing damage, data loss, and negatively affecting water management during massive wildfires. It becomes crucial to reduce the impact of wildfires on them. The current study aims to improve the fire resistance of monitoring equipment. Internal thermal insulation was designed for the instrumentation cabinets and tested under different wildfire conditions to evaluate the performance of various materials and equipment designs. The results demonstrated that the new design of the instrumentation cabinet managed to significantly reduce the effect of thermal exposure and kept the temperatures inside the cabinet below the critical threshold of 70 °C for electronics components. Recommendations of insulation and alternative designs are provided for construction in wildland and wildland-urban interface areas.