Washington Administrative Code › Title 51 - Enterprise Services, Department of (Building Code Council) › Chapter 51-55 - State Building Code adoption and amendment of the 2021 edition of the Wildland-Urban Interface Code › Section 51-55-0900 - Chapter 9-Fire danger rating system

Current through Register Vol. 24-14, July 15, 2024
User note:
About this chapter: The fuel
				models included in Chapter 9 are only general descriptions because they
				represent all wildfire fuels from Florida to Alaska and from the East Coast to
				California.
The National Fire Danger Rating System (NFDRS) is a set
				of computer programs and algorithms that allows land management agencies to
				estimate today's or tomorrow's fire danger for a given rating area. NFDRS
				characterizes fire danger by evaluating the approximate upper limit of fire
				behavior in a fire danger rating area during a 24-hour period based on fuels,
				topography and weather, or what is commonly called the fire triangle. Fire
				danger ratings are guides for initiating presuppression activities and
				selecting the appropriate level of initial response to a reported wildfire in
				lieu of detailed, site- and time-specific information.
Predicting the potential behavior and effects of
				wildland fire are essential tasks in fire management. Surface fire behavior and
				fire effects models and prediction systems are driven in part by fuelbed inputs
				such as load, bulk density, fuel particle size, heat content and moisture
				content. To facilitate use in models and systems, fuelbed inputs have been
				formulated into fuel models. A fuel model is a set of fuelbed inputs needed by
				a particular fire behavior or fire effects model. Different kinds of fuel
				models are used in fire spread models in a variety of fire behavior modeling
				systems. The fuel models in this appendix correlate with the light, medium, and
				heavy fuel definitions found in Chapter 2 of the code.
901 Fuel models.
901.1 General.
The Fuel Model Key is provided in
				Table 901.1. Fuel Models are described in Sections 901.1.1 through
				901.1.20.
TABLE 901.1
FUEL MODEL
							 KEY
(No change to the
							 table)
901.1.1
FUEL MODEL A. (No change to the
							 text)
901.1.2
FUEL MODEL B. (No change to the
							 text)
901.1.3
FUEL MODEL C. (No change to the
							 text)
901.1.4
FUEL MODEL D. (No change to the
							 text)
901.1.5
FUEL MODEL E. (No change to the
							 text)
901.1.6
FUEL MODEL F. (No change to the
							 text)
901.1.7
FUEL MODEL G. (No change to the
							 text)
901.1.8
FUEL MODEL H. (No change to the
							 text)
901.1.9
FUEL MODEL I. (No change to the
							 text)
901.1.10
FUEL MODEL J. (No change to the
							 text)
901.1.11
FUEL MODEL K. (No change to the
							 text)
901.1.12
FUEL MODEL L. (No change to the
							 text)
901.1.13
FUEL MODEL N. (No change to the
							 text)
901.1.14
FUEL MODEL O. (No change to the
							 text)
901.1.15
FUEL MODEL P. (No change to the
							 text)
901.1.16
FUEL MODEL Q. (No change to the
							 text)
901.1.17
FUEL MODEL R. (No change to the
							 text)
901.1.18
FUEL MODEL S. (No change to the
							 text)
901.1.19
FUEL MODEL T. (No change to the
							 text)
901.1.20
FUEL MODEL U. (No change to the
							 text)