Risk of embankment fires for rail traffic systems in Germany

Embankment fires along railroad infrastructure are a major threat, especially during summer months, and regularly lead to delay and cancellation of rail traffic services. From 2017-2020 the German railroad company “Deutsche Bahn” reported over 1110 embankment fires. With regard to the predicted climate change towards drier and hotter summers in Germany, this number is likely going to increase within the next decades. In order to foster future resilience to this hazard, this study analysed urrent drivers of embankment fires along railroads in Germany and developed an embankment fire risk map for the Germany-wide railway network. Based on incident reports, local exposure and hazard information, Maximum Entropy models were developed to identify major drivers of embankment fire risk, as well as future risk across Germany. Aiming for high spatial resolution (5m²), only a very limited number of events could be used for prediction. Nevertheless, model performances are of good quality. The results highlight the importance of local orography such as slope gradient and orientation, hydro-meteorological conditions as well as distance to urban settlements. A multi-scale analysis approach enables insights to embankment fire risk from local 5m raster scale to a Germany-wide overview with risk aggregated to 5km rail road sections. The Germany-wide risk maps thus presents current hot spot regions, such as Berlin and North Rhine-Westphalia. Zooming in, the high resolved risk maps enable embankment fire risk detection for local action. Considering RCP8.5 scenarios, the potential future will lead to higher risks of embankment fires for large parts of central and southern Germany. This study presents a first attempt to model embankment fire risk country wide at multiple scales. Future work will require more efforts to compile event data with regard to spatial and temporal resolution, but also an extended spectrum of possible drivers.