and damage."
For example, the study found that because the Waldo firefighters tailored their response to the specific WUI conditions, 75 percent of their attempts to extinguish ignited structures were successful and 79 percent of their efforts at fire containment were successful in preventing rampant fire spread.
The details of the NIST study are described in a report released today in Washington, D.C., during the Fire Chiefs White House Roundtable on Climate Change Impacts at the Wildland Urban Interface.
The NIST study, conducted in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Agriculture's U.S. Forest Service (USFS) and the federal Joint Fire Science Program, documented and assessed the chronology, behavior and outcomes of the fire, as well the firefighting activity against it.
In their investigation, Maranghides and his colleagues focused on the Mountain Shadows community in Colorado Springs, the location for all of the homes destroyed in the Waldo Canyon fire. The scientific analysis of the fire's impact on Mountain Shadows and the effectiveness of defensive measures taken to suppress it took two years to complete. Researchers spent 4,500 hours on data collection, conducted more than 200 technical discussions with first responders and made more than 4,500 distinct fire and defensive action observations.
Along with the most detailed timeline for a WUI fire ever created, the Waldo Canyon investigation yielded 37 technical findings that served as the basis for 13 technical recommendations aimed at improving community resilience to wildfires