European Journal of Environmental and Safety Sciences 2014 2(2): 37-47 ISSN 1339-472X European Science and Research Institute (Original Research Paper) Jaroslav Kapusniak (corresponding author) VSB – Technical University of Ostrava, Faculty of Safety Engineering Lumirova 13, 700 30 Ostrava, Czech Republic, e-mail: jaroslav.kapusniak@vsb.cz Results of forest opening-up analysis for ground mobile fire-fighting equipment deployment in LS Maluzina territory – Case study Jaroslav Kapusniak a · Andrea Majlingová b a VSB – Technical University of Ostrava, Faculty of Safety Engineering, Lumirova 13, 700 30 Ostrava, Czech Republic b Fire Research Institute, Ministry of Interior of the Slovak Republic, Rožňavská 11, 83104 Bratislava, Slovakia ABSTRACT The timely and effective intervention of fire brigades to fight the forest fire depends not only on the time of fire sighting and announcing and the time of fire brigades attendance to the intervention place, but also on knowledge on the terrain, existence of forest roads to deploy the ground mobile fire-fighting equipment or even aerial fire-fighting equipment. To have the information on terrain, road network parameters is required to perform a field survey and to process the data of the field survey in the geographic information systems (GIS) environment, where they can be applied in area opening-up analysis. Here we present an approach to opening-up analysis processing in ArcGIS environment. It was performed for the territory of Maluzina Forest Management Unit to deploy the shuttle water relay fire-fighting equipment and for direct fire extinguishing using special forest fire-fighting equipment. The results showed that the territory is opened-up to 23.7 % (2,617.1 ha) for the shuttle water relay fire-fighting equipment and fire extinguishing purposes deploying the ground mobile fire-fighting equipment using only reinforced roads. When deploying the forest special fire-fighting equipment which uses also unpaved roads except the reinforced ones, the opened-up area increased by the 39.3 % to 2,617.1 ha during the dry season and by 14.7 % (5,329.3 ha) during the wet one. Except the ground mobile fire-fighting equipment we also analysed the opening-up level of the territory in case of the “lake system” deployment for forest fire extinguishing. In that case, the index of territory opening-up increased to 85.3 % (8738.2 ha). Keywords: Fire-fighting equipment • Forest fire • GIS • Opening-up analysis 1. Introduction In Forest fires belong among the most harmful factors in forestry, representing the highest risk for fulfilling the ob- jectives of forest management planning. Effective forest fire prevention is a pre-requisite for good forest management in fire prone areas. To have sufficiently developed and quality road network that can be used for efficient fire-fighting is a sign of well-done fire prevention that can lead to reduction of fire vulnerability in that territo- ry. In period 2000 – 2013, there occurred 5392 forest fires in Slovakia and the damage reached the value of 23,879,900 EUR [1]. That is a reason to incorporate the effective fire protection system into a system of multi- resource forest management. The most effective fire protec- tion is effective prevention, however if a fire occurs is nec- essary to start with its localization and suppression as soon as possible. The functional and efficient network of forest roads is a basic pre-requisite as for sustainable multi-resource forest management as well as for fire protection. In particular the planning of forest roads is commonly oriented to assigning the fundamental management activi- ties in the forest and to reduce the costs and environmental impacts of timber logging. Nowadays, the analyses of forest opening-up are performed mainly as a part of timber log- ging process optimization. For this purpose the computer aided or GIS approaches are used. These problems have concerned more authors for many years. The origins of problem addressing are associated with the effort of experts on devolution description processes, documentation of terrain features and mechanization used in to the computing environment. Technological tools - database systems, GIS and data structures have been used in different way and extent for this purpose. Recently, it