A COMBINATION OF FIRE AND DISPERSION MODELING TECHNIQUES FOR SIMULATING A WAREHOUSE FIRE

Understanding the environmental impact of large warehouse fi res can be a daunting task because of uncertainty in establishing a fi re scenario and additional uncertainty about the fate of the fi re plume and its content. A warehouse in New Orleans, Louisiana, had a large fi re on May 14, 2004. In order to estimate ground-level exposure in the neighborhood of the warehouse, a fi re scenario was development and, subsequently, two modeling techniques for the fi re plume dispersion were implemented. First, we applied the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) fi re model ALOFT-FT to calibrate the smoke emissions (and consequently the emissions of PM2.5). Second, we used US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) dispersion models (ISCST3 and AERMOD) to calculate the ground-level concentration of smoke from the fi re. Because of the high heat of the fi re, we estimated that only 6% or less of the fi re emissions could impact the local neighborhood, while 94 % or more of the fi re emis-sions remained high above the ground. For AERMOD, the corresponding percentages are 8 % and 92%