澳大利亞的火災(zāi)引發(fā)了關(guān)于保護(hù)房屋不受火災(zāi)余燼影響的問題

澳大利亞的火災(zāi)引發(fā)了關(guān)于保護(hù)房屋不受火災(zāi)余燼影響的問題

Embers are raining down on communities across Australia.

余燼如雨點般落在澳大利亞各地的社區(qū)。

"The strong winds of a thunderstorm came through, but instead of raining water it was raining embers," one resident told The Sydney Morning Herald. Another described how, as he and his family tried to evacuate on New Year's Eve, "burning embers started falling and houses were starting to get lost."

一位居民告訴《悉尼先驅(qū)晨報》:“雷雨帶來了強(qiáng)風(fēng)，但并沒有帶來雨水，而是帶來了余燼。”另一個人描述了他和他的家人在新年前夜試圖撤離時，“燃燒的灰燼開始掉落，房屋開始被毀。”

More than two dozen people have died in wildfires that started burning in Australia in September. In recent weeks, fires on the east coast of the country have spread quickly with the help of hot-dry weather, burning through millions of acres and forcing thousands of residents to evacuate. Nearly 2.000 homes have been destroyed.

今年9月，澳大利亞發(fā)生森林大火，造成20多人死亡。最近幾周，在干燥炎熱的天氣幫助下，該國東海岸的大火迅速蔓延，燒毀了數(shù)百萬英畝土地，迫使數(shù)千居民疏散。近2000座房屋被毀。

And the airborne embers — not the flames — are largely to blame.

空中的余燼才是罪魁禍?zhǔn)?，而非火焰?/p>

"We've really started to isolate that it's not necessarily the wall of flames that's igniting homes," says Daniel Gorham, a research engineer with the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety in the United States. "Rather, the embers that are traveling ahead of the fire are igniting homes."

美國商業(yè)和家庭安全保險研究所的研究工程師丹尼爾·戈勒姆說:“我們已經(jīng)開始意識到，不一定是燃燒的墻點燃了家庭。”“更確切地說，在火前面移動的余燼點燃了房屋。”

The bigger the fire, the farther it can disperse embers, and the larger and more dangerous those embers can be. As climate change exacerbates heat waves, droughts and poor land use decisions in Australia's arid regions, bushfires are getting larger and more intense — exactly the types of blazes that can fling embers for miles.

火勢越大，余燼越容易擴(kuò)散，余燼越大，越危險。隨著氣候變化加劇了熱浪、干旱和澳大利亞干旱地區(qū)糟糕的土地使用決策，森林火災(zāi)正變得越來越大、越來越嚴(yán)重——正是這種類型的火災(zāi)可以燃燒數(shù)英里。

"A bigger fire is more powerful because the heat," explains Gorham. Big, hot fires like the ones currently burning on the east coast of Australia suck in massive amounts of air and burning debris at their base, and sends everything thousands of feet into the air in a giant plume.

“火越大，熱量越大，”戈勒姆解釋說。像目前在澳大利亞東海岸燃燒的大火，會吸入大量的空氣和燃燒基地的碎片，并將所有東西拋向數(shù)千英尺高的空中并呈現(xiàn)出巨大的煙柱狀。

Weather picks up the embers and the firebrands, lofts them up and casts them way outside the fire perimeter, threatening homes far from the center of the blaze.

天氣會把余燼和火種挑起來，把它們拋到火災(zāi)外圍，威脅著遠(yuǎn)離火災(zāi)中心的房屋。

A 2010 paper published by Australia's national research agency, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, suggested that the vast majority of homes that burn during bushfires are ignited by embers.

澳大利亞國家研究機(jī)構(gòu)聯(lián)邦科學(xué)與工業(yè)研究組織2010年發(fā)表的一篇論文指出，在叢林大火中燒毀的絕大多數(shù)房屋都是由余燼點燃的。

Australia's national building standards are updated every decade on average. The most recent standards were adopted in May 2019.

澳大利亞的國家建筑標(biāo)準(zhǔn)平均每十年更新一次。最新的標(biāo)準(zhǔn)是在2019年5月采用的。

"One of the things we improved for 2019 was the size of gaps in the envelope of a building," explains Ian Weir, one of the authors of the standards, and a researcher at Queensland University of Technology who studies bushfire responsive architecture. Weir says Australian research makes clear that embers are an overwhelming threat to homes, but American research has been crucial for figuring our how to make houses more resilient to flaming debris.

該標(biāo)準(zhǔn)的作者之一、昆士蘭科技大學(xué)研究叢林火災(zāi)響應(yīng)式建筑的研究員伊恩·威爾解釋說:“我們在2019年改進(jìn)的地方之一是建筑圍護(hù)結(jié)構(gòu)的縫隙大小。”威爾說，澳大利亞的研究清楚地表明，灰燼對房屋是一種壓倒性的威脅，但美國的研究對于弄清如何使房屋更能抵御燃燒的碎片至關(guān)重要。

Weir and his regulatory colleagues relied heavily on research conducted by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology, which looked at how embers get lodged in gaps around doors, windows, roof vents and other architectural features.

威爾和他的同事們在很大程度上依賴于美國國家標(biāo)準(zhǔn)與技術(shù)研究所所做的研究，該研究所研究的是灰燼是如何在門窗、屋頂通風(fēng)口和其他建筑特征的縫隙中沉積的。

"They've done some great research on exactly what is the dimension of the gaps at which we start to lose houses," Weir says, "and they've found that anything greater than 2 millimeters, we enable the embers sufficiently large to ignite wall cavities and furniture and so on."

威爾說:“他們已經(jīng)做了一些偉大的研究，確切地研究了我們開始失去房屋的縫隙的尺寸。他們發(fā)現(xiàn)，任何大于2毫米的物體，我們都能使余燼大到足以點燃墻腔和家具等。”

The result is that many homes are dangerously flammable.

其結(jié)果是，許多家庭都是危險的可燃物。