DEVELOPMENT OF A GIS FOR SPATIAL PATTERN ANALYSIS OF HOUSING FIRE

The fire services in cities are forced to perform their task with increasing speed and efficiency, but often a balance does not exist between increasing demands at work and the corresponding increase in both material and human resources. This article presents a software tool based on GIS technology that can be used by fire services to prevent and to respond to an emergency fire in a house or building. This tool has been developed using programs based on gvSIG and R, both free access. The first provides GIS functionality for working with geographic information, while the second takes advantage of its ability to perform statistical analysis. The system developed was used to study the autocorrelation of house fires and to detect hot spots representing areas at risk of fire during the years 2005 and 2008 in the city of Vigo (Spain).