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The WUI Structure/Parcel/Community Fire Hazard Mitigation Methodology (HMM), NIST Technical Note 2205, is the culmination of a 16-month collaboration between WUI fire experts at NIST, the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety (IBHS), and the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CAL FIRE). Drawing on decades of combined research, firefighting, and hazard mitigation experience, the group developed a comprehensive hazard assessment and mitigation methodology to harden appropriate structures and parcels effectively and efficiently against ember and fire exposures in WUI fire events. The HMM provides an implementable path forward by considering the spatial relationships between fuels, exposures, and hardening at the structure and parcel levels. The HMM demonstrates how complex structure hardening is, and how and why hazards associated with both fire and ember exposures need to be mitigated. By describing the relationships between exposure and hardening within the methodology, HMM highlights situations where structure hardening does not provide sufficient protection in the absence of parcel hardening. The HMM also addresses housing density, structure separation distance, and parcel layouts. The methodology was explicitly designed to address the current building stock, i.e., to solve retrofit challenges, and efforts were made to limit retrofit expenses. While the methodology was developed primarily for retrofits, the presented strategy can also be applied to new construction. This video recording of a presentation to the United States Fire Administration (USFA) on April 5, 2022, provides a detailed look at the HMM, and walks through the content and information presented in NIST Technical Note 2205. The complete report may be found at https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/TechnicalNotes/NIST.TN.2205.pdf.
