Kindling FLAMES Completes Informal Settlement Fire Experiments
"They are looking over their shoulders almost every day when it’s windy, when it’s hot, because they don’t know when the fire might come and when someone needs to be extra, extra careful. [A fire] is the biggest thing that they fear." — Nosi Gavini, Construction Coordinator, Welane Construction Company, Cape Town, South Africa
That fear is felt across the world, with 1 billion people living in informal settlements, where fires can quickly spread and displace entire communities. Roughly 95% of fire deaths occur in low- and middle-income countries, yet much of the fire safety field has historically been shaped by high-income countries, and research and regulations often focus on resources and infrastructure that are unattainable for many of these communities. This disconnect underscores the need to broaden whose experiences are reflected in research and practice. The non-profit organization Kindling works to address this problem that much of the world overlooks. Kindling partners directly with residents, engineers, firefighters, and legislators to improve fire safety in informal settlements and humanitarian settings in realistic ways, with a mission to advance fire safety for all.
UL Research Institutes’ Fire Safety Research Institute has invested in this critical work since 2024 through the Kindling FLAMES (Fire Risk Reduction through Learning, Amplification, Mobilization, and Empowerment) partnership. This multi-phase project combines fire safety research and collaborative work with community partners. Kindling has completed the first phase of this project, which involved conducting experiments to determine the impact of different shelter materials on fire spread in informal settlements. They focused on the hazard component of fire spread — how a single shelter burns and the ways it can spread fire to its surroundings.
Studying the Impact of Different Shelter Materials on Fire Spread in Informal Settlements
In each experiment, researchers burned a single mock shelter. Each experiment used identical shelter floor plans and wood crib fuel loads, allowing the researchers to isolate and evaluate the impact of different building materials. A variety of instrumentation captured critical data on the fire — gas temperatures, heat fluxes in all directions, the size and direction of projected flames, and the heat release rate of the fire. What made this series of experiments especially ambitious was the scale and conditions. Researchers conducted numerous full-scale outdoor burns, working through a wet winter in South Africa.
The tested wall materials included:
- Noncombustible walls: sheet metal, cement block, mud
- Noncombustible roofs: sheet metal
- Combustible walls: timber, split bamboo, bamboo mat, polycarbonate, thatch
- Combustible roof: thatch (pitched and flat), split bamboo
- Tent: tarpaulin (a heavy-duty waterproof plastic sheet) walls and roof with a steel frame
The video below introduces the challenges of fire safety in informal and humanitarian settlements and how Kindling explored the impact of building materials on fire spread.
Key initial findings include:
- Shelters of different materiality exhibit different levels of fire hazard that they could potentially expose their neighbors to.
- Noncombustible walls and roof: Classic compartment fire behavior dominates, with the prevailing hazard being flames projected from windows and doors.
- Combustible walls: Walls on all sides burn intensely, contributing an additional source of external flaming and generating higher and more evenly distributed heat fluxes.
- Combustible roofs: Hot gases vented upwards, limiting flames projected from the windows and doors, but resulting in evenly distributed radiation around the whole shelter.
- Thatch and bamboo produced many firebrands, or embers, which can provide another route for fire spread.
The following video outlines how compartment fires behave in structures built with different materials.
These findings ultimately demonstrated that each combination of wall and roof material creates different hazards, and there is no one-size-fits-all safe separation distance. There will be tradeoffs with any choice, so it is important to understand how shelters built with available materials will behave in a fire.
Regardless of the construction, research shows that increasing the separation distance between shelters can delay or prevent fire spread through both flame impingement and radiation. Current guidance documents for the humanitarian sector specify recommended distances, which are often impractical and unattainable for dense informal settlements. Therefore, it is important to focus on marginal increases (even as small as 4-8 in), where possible, to delay fire spread.
The following video outlines the ways these technical findings inform practice and guidance.
Kindling will release a technical report on these experiments, as well as a guidance note, in the coming months, while they continue to work with communities and institutions to embed the findings in real settlements. To better share their work with researchers, humanitarian workers, legislators, communities, first responders, and partners, Kindling redesigned their website to help people explore real-world examples of fire risk reduction in informal settlements, dive into the science and evidence behind their approach, learn how collaboration drives better outcomes, and discover practical opportunities for collaboration.
