Protecting communities from wildfires is of primary concern to wildfire management agencies. Under certain environmental and wildfire conditions, a burning ember can travel beyond a fuel break, such as a river or road, and produce a new fire, known as a spot fire. This phenomenon allows a wildfire to overcome barriers, which can put a strain on resources and put communities at risk. In this talk, we formulate the process of spot fire development and derive the distribution of the time to the first spot fire occurring beyond a fuel break. A simulator is developed in the framework to generate burning embers from an active wildfire that may result in a spot fire. With the generated data, we demonstrate how to estimate the rate of developing spot fires and identify significant covariates based on data in two practical formats. This is a joint work with John Braun (UBC-O) et Joan Hu (SFU).