Ashley Branum was just a couple days away from giving birth to her first child on a clear October day in 2023, when she sat alone inside her San Luis Obispo home. Branum heard some commotion outside and went to check it out. After clearing her doorway, she was greeted with a plume of smoke and fire just beyond her front yard.
“I could see the planes dropping the fire retardant,” Branum said. “I called my husband and told him that he needed to come home right now.”
The fire, known as the Lizzie Fire, burned just above San Luis Obispo High School on Lookout Hill, where wildlife and urban life meet. That plume of smoke Branum saw is the kind of moment wildfire researchers try to capture, analyze and model — sometimes using tools like Simtable, which is software that can recreate fire behavior down to the terrain.
In October 2025, the San Luis Obispo Fire Department hosted an open house, one of the demonstrations was a recreation of the Lizzie Fire of 2023. This is where Branum was able to watch the fire spread, not from her house at the ground level, but from a birds-eye view.
“It brought back a lot of feelings for sure,” Branum said.
Cal Poly’s Wildland-Urban Interface Fire Institute, located inside Cal Poly’s Technology Park, has studied the interaction between wildfires and urban environments since its conception in 2021. Headed by Director Frank Frievalt, the institute unites faculty and students from different departments with industry leaders, CAL FIRE and local fire stations to complete research to reduce wildfire severity especially as it relates to cities and towns.
Simtable is a simulation tool that the Wildland-Urban Interface Fire Institute and other organizations like CAL FIRE use to visually model fires.
It consists of a large tray filled with finely-crushed walnut shells or sand, with a computer-operated projector.
A topographic map of a given area is projected onto the tray, where the sand can be rearranged to model the elevation and terrain of the displayed area. The operator can customize controls to simulate different variables of a fire. They can spark fires miles from the main blaze, stage EMTs and speed or slow time to model the fire’s growth, Frievalt said.
New visualization tools such as Simtable have come at a time where wildfires are growing in size and intensity.
75 percent of the 20 most structurally destructive wildfires in California have occurred since 2015, according to CAL FIRE.
Katabatic wind, commonly called Santa Ana wind in Southern California, is a weather effect where wind rushes down a mountain range as higher density air gets pulled down by gravity. Both the Eaton and Palisades Fires in Los Angeles County in early 2025 were enhanced by these strong winds, according to Frievalt.
The combination of high winds and dry conditions leading up to both fires resulted in the second- and third-most destructive wildfires in California’s history.
“Through changes in our climate, we’re seeing more severe catastrophic weather events,” Frievalt said. “The frequency is going up and the severity is going up.”
Modeling the interaction between wildland and urban settings
One of the main usages for Simtable is to project how fires spread through wildland settings.
The Simtable can also project a fuel map based on satellite data that shows different materials that influence how fire spreads in a given area. This can demonstrate why a wildfire might spread faster in certain areas and why they are at higher risk.
It is a complex piece of equipment that can’t be picked up on the fly, according to Frievalt. One of the first tasks that Wildland-Urban Interface student assistant Garrett Lee had at the institute was to learn how it operated.
“The Simtable gets to Cal Poly and there’s no instructions,” Lee said. “It really took me thinking to myself, I have to learn how to do this, people are depending on me.”
While Cal Poly did eventually get an instruction manual, it wasn’t suitable for the high turnover rate that a college program would have.
Lee basically had to rewrite the handbook to suit the Fire Institute’s needs.
Educating firefighters and the community
The table not only models how fires spread but also serves as a training tool for firefighters.
Operators can simulate actions to fight fires on Simtable such as airdrops from tankers, hose lines, fuel bulldozers and hand crews.
“One of its other main uses is the ability to train people for tactical decision making, such that their decisions are reflected and the consequences of their decisions or indecision become available on the screen,” Frievalt said. “It’s a very inexpensive way to learn tough lessons.”
Another big usage of Simtable is to educate the community. When the new fire hazard map took effect in July 2025, it brought new sets of rules to many houses and businesses.
“The maps have really changed the narrative and changed the rules for what is required of homeowners and business owners in the city and county as a whole,” former San Luis Obispo Fire Chief Todd Tuggle said.
Not only were there rules attached to these new fire zones, but the maps themselves could be confusing.
With red, orange and yellow jutting in and out for no apparent reason, questions were raised about what each zone meant and how it affected local residents — questions that can be visually explained with Simtable.
“We have these new things with the fire severity zones and the [Wildland-Urban Interface] ordinances, and it’s scary for people because they don’t know anything about it,” Lee said.
The Simtable is able to provide visual answers to questions that residents of San Luis Obispo have, according to Lee.
This story originally appeared in the April printed edition of Mustang News. Check out more stories from the issue here.
