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Introduction:
Fire risks in urban areas have undoubtedly increased over the years and the rising cost of fire losses would seem to indicate that they are increasing at a greater rate than the measures devised to control them. Due to the rapid increase in population, industrialization, rapid rise in new colonies, construction of high rises etc the fire risk in the cities has tremendously increased.

Pune city is growing at a very fast rate, the city core, containing a major share of residential as well as commercial development, is marked by high densities, narrow roads, heavy traffic and paucity of open spaces.

The present study was aimed at achieving three objectives:

1. To develop a visualization technique (map animation) to analyze the nature of fire incidents by their type, their spatial distribution, their variation over time in Arcview using it’s scripting language ‘Avenue’.
2. To analyze the effectiveness of the existing fire station network in terms of their serve-ability or reach-ability for different response times (eg., 3, 5, 7, 9, 11 minutes) and find out the time required to serve the entire area assuming the average speed of the fire vehicle to be 30 km/hr.
3. Development of a Arcview customized interface which would improve the decision making of the fire brigade personnel especially with reference to routing with a easy to use interface.

Database generation:

1. Fire Stations Layer generated from commercially available map of Pune city at a scale of 1:5000.
2. Hospitals Layer generated from the same commercially available map of Pune City.
3. Past Fire Incidents Layer generated from data provided by the Central Fire Brigade, Pune Municipal Corporation. The data provided contained details of 1100 fire incidents dated from 25/08/2001 to 24/02/2002, out of which only 346 were inside the study area.
   
   The address of the fire incidents provided by the Central Fire Brigade, Pune Municipal Corporation was the most detailed form of spatial reference available in the data. The addresses were not suitable for automatic geocoding; consequently a labour intensive manual process was conducted using a combination of the commercially available map, and other street atlases. The address field was removed from the database after plotting the fire incidents to help preserve confidentiality in the analysis phase of the study. Since some addresses could not be precisely located the number of incidents that were finally plotted was 235. These incidents were further used for analysis and visualization.
   
   
4. Roads layer: The current study needed roads information at a very large scale and so the roads layer of the city was digitized from the commercially available map of Pune City at a scale of 1:5000. The map was scanned and geocoded with reference to SOI Toposheet no 47 J 14 and the roads were digitized and projected into Universal Transverse Mercator/Everest Projection. The Central Fire Brigade’s report on a survey of the city roads provided information about the roads that are very narrow and thus inaccessible by the fire tender, these roads were excluded from the study.

The attributes of the Fire Stations viz., name of the Fire Station, no of personnel, name of the Station Officer, no of fire tenders etc. were collected. The attributes of the fire incidents included date, time, type (whether short circuit or gas leak) and complete address of the incident and was collected from the Central Fire Brigade, Pune Municipal Corporation.

The costs for traveling the roads were given on a scale of 1 to 10 based on a report of the study of traffic density conducted by the Traffic Control Branch, Pune Municipal Corporation, in which the roads were classified into 5 classes according to the traffic density viz., very high, high, moderate, low and very low traffic density.

The rights of ways for roads was incorporated into the roads layer by creating a turntable in Arcview through Avenue scripting as Arcview does not provide a means for the generation of a turntable for a network through it’s GUI.

Map animation:
A map contains lot of information that can be used by different individuals and organizations. “A map is the greatest of all epic poems. Its lines and colors show the realization of great dreams.” Gilbert Grosvenor, Editor (1903-1954), National Geographic.

Map Animation is a visualization tool that goes beyond conventional static point mapping, avoiding potential large data loss when the time dimension of datasets is aggregated. The use of animation as a means of data presentation and visualization of information is increasing with the diffusion of ‘multi media technology’. Map Animation techniques have been applied in the social geography arena to analyze crime incidents, epidemiology and urban growth. In the current study an attempt was made to visualize the fire incidents and their spatial and temporal patterns in the form of an animated map. It was hypothesized that patterns across space and time would be evident in the fire incident database. Arcview 3.2a was used to test this hypothesis.

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