RAPID: Infrastructure Resilience and Impact Study for Wildfire-affected Infrastructure in Los Angeles (2025) (IRIS-Wildfire)

Wildfires pose a severe threat to civil infrastructure, especially in high-density wildland-urban interface (WUI) communities. The January 2025 Los Angeles wildfires, including the Palisades and Eaton Fires, were among the most destructive in California's history and resulted in extensive infrastructure damage. This Grant for Rapid Response Research (RAPID) award supports research to analyze wildfire impacts on infrastructure resilience in highly dense WUI communities by collecting and analyzing perishable field data on the performance of infrastructure in areas impacted by the Eaton and Palisades Fires.

This data collection will support advancements in predictive modeling for infrastructure performance, the design of fire-resilient infrastructure, and the formulation of guidelines for wildfire mitigation.

The objectives of this RAPID project are to (a) collect high-resolution aerial and ground-based data on fire-impacted structures and communities; (b) analyze structure-to-structure fire spread patterns and key resilience factors; (c) evaluate the effectiveness of firebreaks and mitigation strategies; and (d) enhance fire propagation modeling based on observed data. This data will include (a) high-resolution aerial scans of regions impacted by both fires; (b) ground-based inspections of characteristics of building clusters, including structural features, defensible spaces, and layout of the neighborhood in selected areas; (c) attributes of standing and lightly damaged buildings (separation distance to nearby structures, construction material, defensible spaces, windows, vents, roofing types, and attached deck or fences are among factors to be studied); (d) ground-based inspections of schools including property layout, distance to nearest structures, and orientation of the school with respect to the fire front and wind direction; and (e) damage indicators for reinforced concrete bridges such as cracking, crazing, spalling, and color change, and non-destructive testing to evaluate material change in strength.

The data collection will use the Unmanned Aerial Systems and LiDAR equipment provided by the NSF-supported Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure (NHERI) Natural Hazards and Disaster Reconnaissance (RAPID) facility at the University of Washington. The data collected from this project will be archived and made publicly available through the NHERI Data Depot (https://www.DesignSafe-ci.org).

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.