As wildfires ravaged neighborhoods in Los Angeles this week, residents and authorities faced a difficult and near-impossible challenge: convincing hundreds of thousands of people to leave their homes to escape danger, within hours or minutes. officials conducted years of research on fire evacuation. The field is small but growing, reflecting a new study that says the frequency of extreme fires has doubled since 2023. The growth is led by devastating fires in the western United States, Canada, and Russia. [in evacuation research] has increased due to the frequency of wildfires,” said Asad Ali, an engineering doctoral student at North Dakota State University whose work focuses on the field. “We’re seeing more publications, more articles.” If evacuation is wrong, it’s wrong. In the Pacific Palisades neighborhood in LA, panicked drivers left their vehicles in the middle of the evacuation route, leaving emergency crews unable to reach the fire. Authorities used bulldozers to push the empty cars. To prevent this chaos, researchers tried to answer some basic but critical questions: Who who reacts to what danger? And when are people most likely to get out of harm’s way? Many researchers’ ideas about evacuation come from various other disasters-from studies of citizens’ reactions to floods, or nuclear disasters, or volcanic eruptions, and especially wind hurricanes. But hurricanes and wildfires are different in some obvious, and less obvious ways. Storms are usually larger, and affect entire regions, requiring many countries and agencies to work together to help people travel longer distances. But hurricanes are also relatively predictable and slow-moving, and tend to give authorities more time to organize escapes and strategize about phased evacuations so that everyone doesn’t hit the streets immediately. Wildfires are less predictable, and require rapid communication. People’s decisions to leave or stay are also affected by an inconvenient reality: Residents who live during a hurricane cannot do anything to prevent disaster. But for those who remain in the haze of wildfires to defend their homes with hoses or water, the gambit sometimes works. “Pscychologiclally, wildfire evacuation is very difficult,” Asad said. The research so far shows that the reaction to wildfires, and whether people choose to stay, go, or just wait for a while, can be determined by several things: whether residents have been through wildfire danger before, and whether the authorities’ warning before the real threat; how the emergency has been communicated to them; and how the surrounding neighbors react. One survey of some 500 California wildfire evacuees conducted in 2017 and 2018 found that some long-term residents who have experienced lots of previous wildfire events are less likely to evacuate-but others do exactly the opposite. Overall, low-income people are less likely to flee, possibly because of limited access to transportation or lodging. This type of survey can be used by authorities to create models that tell people when to evacuate. Kendra K. Levine, director of the library at the Institute for Transportation Studies at UC Berkeley. Santa Ana winds in Southern California, for example, are not uncommon. They happen every year. But combine the wind with the historic drought—and the possibility of regional climate change—and wildfires start to look more like weather. “People are starting to understand” the relationship, Levine said, which has led to more interest and scholarship among those who specialize in extreme weather. Asad, the North Dakota researcher, said they had meetings about using the data collected during this time. disaster week for use in future research. It’s a faint silver lining, the horror Californians experienced this week can produce important findings that will help others avoid the worst in the future.
