Engineering resilience: Expert Ramla Qureshi on mitigating the impact of wildfires

With each passing season, wildfires become increasingly frequent and violent. And with nearly 80 per cent of Canadians living within one kilometer of a wildland urban interface line — a boundary zone where human infrastructure meets natural environments — Canada is at particular risk. Ramla Qureshi, an assistant professor of Civil Engineering, is an expert in resilient infrastructure. Her research focuses on fortifying [...] Read More... The post Engineering resilience: Expert Ramla Qureshi on mitigating the impact of wildfires appeared first on McMaster News .

With each passing season, wildfires become increasingly frequent and violent. And with nearly 80 per cent of Canadians living within one kilometer of a wildland urban interface line — a boundary zone where human infrastructure meets natural environments — Canada is at particular risk. Ramla Qureshi, an assistant professor of Civil Engineering, is an expert in resilient infrastructure.

Her research focuses on fortifying buildings against natural and human-made hazards, such as fires, earthquakes and blasts. Here, Qureshi answers questions and shares insights about the growing risk of wildfires, how urban sprawl has impacted the way we see these events, and the roles engineers can play in mitigating risk. What is a wildfire?

A wildfire is a natural, integral process of our ecosystem where forests purge themselves of dead leaves and debris that collects over time. This results in the decomposition of nutrients that the forest can then revitalize and use as it grows in the next cycle. What is the difference between a wildfire and an urban-interface fire?

A wildfire and an urban-interface fire are two very different beasts altogether. A wildfire has this relatively common vegetation-based fuel to burn the majority of the time. But when a wildfire enters a community, now you have cars burning, homes burning, and all of these have different heat signatures and different ways that you put out the fire.

It becomes very chaotic. Even wind in a city is very different because of the terrain as opposed to what you’d expect in forested regions. Therefore, we are now looking into “What are these little bits and tweaks we can do that can help prevent the escalation into an urban conflagration?”

How have these wildfires changed in recent years? In Canada and North America in general, we’ve had an aggressive suppression-based policy around wildfires, which has led to this collection of cellulosic debris that acts as a combustible fuel that sits on our forest floors, ready to burn. With the addition of intense weather events and, in part, climate change, this has led to fires burning with far more intensity than we are previously used to.

Why are these wildfires spreading to communities so frequently? We’re building more and more within forested boundaries to address the current housing crisis we face in the country. And by doing this we’re contributing to an interfacing urban sprawl inside what is otherwise natural land.

So now we’re increasing the probability of exposure to this hazard without really considering the overall vulnerability of the built environment. Many regions of the country do look to vertical living to tackle this ever-increasing demand, but at the same time, we also have other, more localized hazards to worry about. For example, in Western Canada, we have the possibility of large, mega-thrust earthquakes, which makes vertical living another avenue for engineers to work on so that we can supply safe and affordable housing.

But, while urban sprawl is inevitable, wildfires are also inevitable. At this point, we have to figure out our best-case scenario of how to coexist with this hazard and how to adapt our living scenarios such that we can go back to the fundamental engineering tenets of preserving life and public safety. How does an engineer play a role in mitigating some of the destruction that comes with wildfires, specifically for people and communities?

We need to understand that fire and combustion is not new. We all understand that wood burns, and we all understand that concrete probably doesn’t. Very simple changes in the way we build can actually lead to substantial life savings and cost savings in the long run.

First, though, we need to understand the hazard in a deeper manner. As engineers, we need to be able to communicate with the residents, the municipalities and the stakeholders at large, and that can only happen if we are able to translate structural and insured damages into dollar amounts, based on let’s say the probability of recurrence that a wildfire can breach into a community. At the same time, structural fire engineers need to be working with insurance agencies, with governance and policy makers, with insurance agencies and with local municipalities and residents to help figure out how we can engineer better solutions to coexist and secure more confidence in the safety of our households.

What are some of the barriers to this work? Because of our history of separating forest fires from structural fires, there’s very different policies when it comes to firefighting regimes around both and so there’re very different approaches within our building codes. For example, the National Building Code of Canada is a model building code for the provinces to follow, but it does not actually have any specific documentation that makes it mandatory to look into wildfires as a hazard.

As a result, a lot of the land management falls back to the municipalities who have to go back and find forested zones, mark out historical fire parameters and look into how they can mitigate this hazard. When municipalities have to do this work by themselves, it becomes very hard to make sure that everything that should happen happens, from an execution point of view all the way to an inspection point of view. And inevitably, then, there are gaps that are still present in this system.

What goes through your mind when you hear about wildfires? It’s basically all I think about these days.

When we hear of forest fires burning, I am concerned if they are closer to communities and community boundaries. I keep track of which communities are being affected and how people are moving in and out of these hazard zones. For example, in the 2025 Palisades fire in California, we heard of senior citizens who refused to evacuate.

Because there was so much anxiety and fear about what happens next, people were choosing to stay with their burning properties. We’ve also heard similar experiences from Yellowknife, where evacuation plans for moving hospitalized occupants didn’t really pan out as one would hope. So, I’m now working with hospitals to see how we can adapt to this hazard and if there are evacuation plans in place for when a fire breaches a community and is very close to post-hazard buildings such as hospitals.

Is there one thing that you would change that you think would have the biggest impact in terms of spread into these communities and the human impact you’re talking about? There has been research coming out from the U.S. and Canada where looking into non-combustible materials for your decks and your shingles, and looking into better sealing properties for your windows can lead to substantial changes in which property parcel burns and which doesn’t burn. Especially in areas where fires are becoming more prevalent, though, we also understand that this is not just a local or regional issue.

If you think back to last year, you may remember that fires in Manitoba and Northern Saskatchewan led to a poor air quality index here in Hamilton. So even when it’s an event happening elsewhere in the country, we’re still feeling the effects of it. That’s why we are still looking to do more tests and understand how fire spreads within an urban scenario.

Lots more needs to be done at this point for us to move forward collectively, but it has to be all hands on deck. It cannot be just engineers, or just firefighters, or just fire marshals or just the city — everybody has to understand that this is something that we face collectively. The post Engineering resilience: Expert Ramla Qureshi on mitigating the impact of wildfires appeared first on McMaster News .