Following the recent 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire emergency evacuation in Canada, in which 2,400 buildings were destroyed and tens of thousands of people were evacuated, the e-Murray project was started. The project “e-Murray - Modelling requirements for an open-access multiphysics approach to planning of urban evacuations caused by wildfire disasters” seeks to build a novel computational simulation toolkit that will aid in the planning, preparation and training of a community near wildland when attacked by fires.

The e-Murray project has been funded by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and it includes a cross-disciplinary International consortium in which Dr Enrico Ronchi from the Division of Fire Safety Engineering at Lund University is Principal Investigator. Together with Lund University, the consortium includes the Fire Protection Research Foundation at the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) in the USA, the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the Imperial College London in the UK and the National Research Council in Canada .