To rate wildfire danger, Britain looks to Canada

Andy Elliott trudges up a hill through a large, blackened patch of the heath lands in the Dorset countryside where he and a crew of firefighters put out a wildfire the week before.

Charred branches reach up from the soil like antlers made of coal.

"Fire conditions across the U.K. are really extraordinary, and particularly in the southeast of England," Elliott said. "We would use the word extreme."

The firefighter and wildfire researcher with the University of Exeter says that though the U.K. has always had lots of small wildfires, they're now seeing blazes become larger and more intense, threatening lives and homes. 

Elliott leans down to put a soil moisture gauge in the ground and reaches into the brush to collect crisp leaves and brambles which he places in a bag. These samples will be taken to a university lab where they'll be ignited under controlled conditions to measure how flammable they are and how they could fuel a fire.

It's all part of a project involving universities and researchers across the U.K. to adapt a national wildfire danger rating system based on the Canadian Forest Fire Danger Rating System.

"The U.K. doesn't officially have a fire danger rating system as such," Elliott said.

"It's very ad hoc. It's down to local fire rescue services to put safety messages out, and the local authorities will put safety messages out, but there's no real co-ordination."

Elliott and the teams working across the country hope to change that by adopting the Canadian system to create a single source of high-quality information for fire officials to use to plan and warn the public.

Because there are such a diverse number of ecosystems in the United Kingdom, teams in different areas have had to split off to do field work.

"Fuels are different across the U.K. We recognize that they change with latitude," Elliott said. 

"So all of that is being looked at and measured at the moment so that we can give a system that will be, we hope, publicly available, that we hope will be used by the responding emergency services." 

For roughly a century, researchers and public safety workers in Canada developed various measures and scales to anticipate the degree of forest fire risk. But it was in 1968 that Canada first established its national Canadian Forest Fire Danger Rating System.

Mike Wotton, a research scientist with the Canadian Forest Service and a Forestry professor at the University of Toronto, is one of the Canadians helping U.K. researchers modify the model for their country.