Dra. Sabine Delaître y Dr. Francisco Rodriguez y Silva
ENSMP, Pôle Cindyniques, Sophia-Antipolis, Francia
Sabine.Delaitre@cindy.cma.fr
University of Córdoba
Department of Forestry Engineering
Teaching Unit for the Defence against Forest Fires, Spain
Photos provided by the author.

  1. INTRODUCTION

  This article is about the project related to the capitalisation of experience derived from the defence programmes against forest fires. This project aims at memorising all the possible experiences about the organisation in the fight against fires in order to be able to outline a help for the management of their extinction. For this purpose it is required the use of a seven-card system called LEX (Learning by EXperience) which has been elaborated in order to respond to the necessities of experience capitalisation.
At a first moment, experience is considered as the history of the fight, from the beginning to the end of the fire development; paying attention to each of the attack plans made for the control and extinction of forest fires. This experience has to be objective in order to build up the collective memory (the memory of the experiences about the defence against forest fires) as faithfully as possible to reality. Here the two first LEX cards are necessary.
Then, experience is considered as a retrospective look into the organisation of the fight against these fires. The rest of the LEX cards are used to capitalise this experience. The aim is to obtain a point of view about the organisation of the fight previously developed in order to improved the combat system proposing an access to last experiences, and among them, it is possible to distinguish both, the efficient experiences as well as the failed ones.

   Traditionally, the systems and organisations used by the responsible administrations for the defence against forest fires have been developing the extinction tasks, generally without designing a chapter for the research of the events derived from different fires. The analysis of the situations, the reconstruction of the facts, the mobilisation of resources according to the development experimented by the dynamic fire spreading are, among others, researching lines to understand the importance of the "experience" study; being this one understood as the capitalisation of the events, circumstances and results. The fact of having this documentary basis of information about the reality of the experiences, obtained from previous forest fires, gives us an inestimable help for the application of the "experience" to fires with similar characteristics therefore, it makes easier the efficiency in elaborating attacking plans.

   Fighting against forest fires needs numerous data about countryside knowledge, massive information about the fire state and experience. Nowadays, different computer systems are being used in order to help when taking decisions. Some systems use the countryside knowledge or physical data , for instance the fire spreading simulator ; others use the satellite images which make possible the visualisation of the fire perimeter during its development. However, none of them uses the experiences obtained from the people at different levels of responsibility who take part in the fight. In this sense, the communication of the acquired knowledge, which represents the capitalisation of the experience, is the first phase of the management and its own reutilization. So the capitalisation method is founded the experience to be capitalised is defined in order to make easier its reutilization in similar situations