RAPID/Collaborative Research: San Bruno, California, September 9, 2010, Gas Pipeline Explosion and Fire

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This Grant for Rapid Response Research (RAPID) provides funding to study the San Bruno explosion and fire. On September 9, 2010, in San Bruno, California, a suburb of San Francisco, a 30-inch steel natural gas pipeline exploded in flames, igniting a fire that ultimately killed seven residents and damaged or destroyed dozens of houses. An interdisciplinary field team will provide a holistic account of the event across the engineering and social sciences by gathering data on pre-event building, topography, and weather conditions; the rate and modes of fire spread and suppression; and elements of multiorganizational coordination and decisionmaking. The aims of the project are to: (a) improve understanding of how urban fires spread and are suppressed, (b) support development and validation of next-generation urban fire simulation models, and (c) advance theories of resilience. Scholars are now at work on the next generation of fire spread modeling, employing physics-based approaches that encompass many more variables and that explicitly consider variability in building composition, contents, and urban design. As the next generation of models, however, these have lacked opportunities for validation in actual fire scenarios. Thus analysis of the San Bruno fire will appreciably advance knowledge by improving understanding of urban fire spread and suppression, and by permitting validation and refinement of existing models. Management structures such as the Incident Command System (ICS) depend on information flow amongst organizations that are familiar with its use, in situations with recognized procedures. By studying coordination where system familiarity was present, but information was sketchy and ambiguous and procedures improvised, the study will refine our knowledge of the relative strengths of command structures as tools for interorganization decisionmaking. By explicitly considering the interaction of infrastructure capacities and management systems, the project recasts critical infrastructure to include human operators and their deliberate decisionmaking and interventions.The research team anticipates a number of broader impacts. These include the development and dissemination of improved fire-spread models for conflagrations in residential neighborhoods. These models, once validated, can inform the knowledge base of fire protection engineers and urban planners in their design of structures and spaces, as well as firefighters who may be confronted with such situations following earthquakes, landslips, or terrorist activity. Ground-level decisionmaking and coordination approaches will be bolstered by findings on the multiorganizational coordination of the event. The PIs teach numerous engineering and emergency management courses which will ensure that findings reach the user community both directly and through publications and presentations at relevant conferences and symposia. In addition, graduate students will develop skill in post-disaster fieldwork, to include engineering and social-science data gathering, analysis, and theory development. On a larger scale, recent sizable infrastructure failures, such as the collapse of the I35 bridge in Minneapolis, have highlighted the age and condition of US infrastructure. Information developed through this study may inform policymaking regarding burgeoning vulnerabilities in vital systems.