Assessing urban fire risk in the historic city centre of Guimarães

Abstract

The main objective of this work was to evaluate the urban fire risk of the Historic Centre of Guimarães, Portugal, which was declared by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site in 2001. From the study of the singular urban, architectural and constructive characteristics of Historic Centre of Guimarães, the present research focused on the analysis of a broad set of information collected in situ and on its subsequent use to apply a simplified urban fire risk assessment methodology. A GIS tool (Geographic Information System) was used to process and plot the results, allowing to obtain vulnerability maps from which it is possible to assess the global vulnerability of the Historical Centre of Guimarães, as well as to identify the areas where, from the evaluation of four global factors related with the fire ignition, propagation, evacuation and combat, urban fire risk is potentially higher.