Historical villages are a highly valuable historical and cultural resource to directly/indirectly recognize and experience unique traditional culture in our daily lives. There are eight historical villages worldwide designated by UNESCO's ICOMOS. Preserving and passing these historical villages down to future generations is one of the key imperatives.
Such natural disasters as earthquake, heavy snow and damage from storm and flood are potential risk factors of historical villages. Manmade disasters like theft also pose a risk to historical villages. But, it is fire that poses highest risk to historical villages particularly when folk structures in the villages are built by accessible wood, silver grass and straw. Hahoe Village and Yangdong Village in Korea have straw-roofed houses and Shirakawa-go in Japan has silver grass-roofed houses.
Combustion characteristics of these roof materials need to be identified in order to enhance fire safety in historical villages. This study used cone calorimeter (ISO 5660-1) to measure combustion characteristics of straw in Korea and silver grass in Japan. It also analyzed Time to Ignition (TTI), Effective Heat of Combustion(EHC), Heat Release Rate(HRR), Total Heat Release(THR), Mass Loss Rate(MLR) and temperature and time of natural ignition. Database on combustion characteristics of straw and silver grass will be used to predict fire property of buildings and structures in historical villages.

• Lee, Ji-Hee(Research Professor, School of Architecture and Civil Engineering, Kyungpook National University)
• Kim, Dong-Hyun(Researcher, Disaster Research Lab., Korea Forest Research Institute)
• Kim, Wha-Jung