Fire incidents in municipal waste management facilities remain a persistent safety issue, complicated by high variability and limited reliability of available data. This study presents a process-oriented evaluation of 86 fire incidents recorded between 2013 and 2022 in the South Moravian Region of the Czech Republic, based on a verified non-public database of the Fire Rescue Service. Most incidents (approximately 76%) were associated with municipal solid waste landfills, confirming their dominant role within the sector. Spontaneous combustion was identified as the most frequent ignition mechanism; however, in nearly 78% of cases, the exact cause could not be conclusively determined, indicating a high level of uncertainty in incident reporting. Key quantitative indicators, including extinguishing water consumption (mean 32 m3, median 10 m3) and affected fire area, exhibited substantial variability, limiting their direct use for quantitative evaluation. To address these limitations, representative fire scenarios were systematically identified and analysed using the ARIA 3 framework in combination with the Bow-Tie methodology. This approach enables the interpretation of fire incidents as disturbances in operational processes and supports the identification of scenario-specific preventive and mitigation barriers. The results show that, despite data uncertainty, incident records provide a robust basis for identifying recurring fire patterns and facility-specific vulnerabilities, supporting scenario-based risk management and informed decision-making in municipal waste management systems.
Trávníček et al. (Thu,) studied this question.