The UMD Christmas Tree Fire Size Prediction Competition: An annual event to promote fire safety awareness, education, and community

Published

December 6, 2024

Author(s)

Isaac Leventon

Abstract

Each year since 2014, the Department of Fire Protection Engineering at the University of Maryland has coordinated a Christmas Tree fire safety event to highlight the potential fire risk of dry Christmas Trees. Full-scale fire experiments at these events are used to show how properly maintaining a cut Christmas tree (to maintain a high moisture content in tree branches and needles) can help to limit ignition likelihood, fire growth rate, and peak fire size. These experiments not only serves to provide a public safety message to local and national media outlets; they also support experiential learning of fire protection engineering students at UMD, have been used to generate measurement data for wildfire research (e.g., fire brand yield of full-scale burning vegetation), and are part of a friendly international competition (members of the the fire safety science community) to predict the burning behavior of Christmas tree fires. This short article provides an overview of the fire safety demos, their wide ranging impact, and safety tips (from the NFPA) to help reduce the fire risk posed by natural Christmas Trees.

Citation

Burning Matters: Fire Safety Knowledge That Matters

Pub Weblink

https://burningmatters.beehiiv.com/

Pub Type

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Keywords

fire dynamics, fire protection education and outreach, fire risk reduction, vegetation

Citation

Leventon, I. (2024), The UMD Christmas Tree Fire Size Prediction Competition: An annual event to promote fire safety awareness, education, and community, Burning Matters: Fire Safety Knowledge That Matters, [online], https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=959167, https://burningmatters.beehiiv.com/ (Accessed November 24, 2025)