The science is evolving (and inaccurate) about fleeing wildfires

EQUAL forest fire Drilling down residential areas all over Los Angeles This week, people and authorities faced a painful and nearly impossible challenge: convincing hundreds of thousands of people to leave their homes and escape danger in just a few hours or even minutes.

In doing so, officials conducted years of research on wildfire evacuations. The field is small but growing, reflecting recent research that suggests the frequency of extreme wildfires has more than doubled since 2023. The increase was led by devastating fires in the western United States, Canada and Russia.

“Definitely the interest [in evacuation research] There has been an increase due to the frequency of wildfires,” said Asad Ali, an engineering doctoral student at North Dakota State University whose work focuses on this area. “We are seeing more publications, more articles.”

When evacuations go wrong, they go really wrong. In LA’s Pacific Palisades neighborhood, panicked drivers stuck in traffic abandoned their cars in the middle of the evacuation route, making it impossible for firefighters to reach the fire. Authorities used bulldozer to push empty cars off the road.

To prevent this chaos, researchers are trying to answer some basic but important questions: Who responds to what types of warnings? And when are people most likely to escape danger?

Many researchers’ ideas about evacuation come from other types of disasters – from studies of people’s reactions to floods, nuclear disasters or volcanic eruptions and other disasters. especially storms.

But hurricanes and wildfires differ in some obvious and less obvious ways. Storms are often larger and affect entire areas, which can require multiple states and agencies to cooperate to help people travel longer distances. But storms are also relatively predictable and slow moving, and tend to give authorities more time to organize evacuations and strategize evacuations in stages, so that people don’t set off at the same time. Wildfires are more difficult to predict and require quick communication.

People’s decisions to stay or stay are also influenced by an inconvenient reality: Residents who stay behind during a storm cannot do much to prevent disaster. But for those in the middle of a wildfire protecting their homes with hoses or water, this move sometimes works. “Psychologically, evacuating a forest fire is very difficult,” Asad said.

Research to date shows that the response to bushfires and whether people choose to stay, go or just wait around for a while can be determined by many factors: whether people have previously received warnings forest fire warnings and whether those warnings were correct or not. Next come real threats; how emergencies are communicated to them; and the reactions of their neighbors.

One survey of about 500 California wildfire evacuations conducted in 2017 and 2018 found that some longtime residents who had experienced multiple prior wildfire incidents were less likely to evacuate—but others did the exact opposite. In general, low-income people are less likely to flee, possibly due to limited access to transportation or housing. These types of surveys can be used by authorities to create models that tell them when to instruct which residents to evacuate.

Kendra K. Levine, library director at the Institute for Transportation Studies at UC Berkeley, said one difficulty in current wildfire evacuation research is that researchers don’t necessarily classify wildfire events. into the “extreme weather” category. For example, Santa Ana winds in Southern California are not unusual. They happen every year. But combine the winds with the region’s historic and possibly climate-change-related dryness, and the wildfires are starting to look more like weather. “People are starting to accept” this relationship, which has led to more interest and scholarship in people who specialize in severe weather, Levine said.

Asad, the North Dakota researcher, said he has held meetings about using data collected during this week’s disasters for future research. It’s a faint glimmer of hope that the horror Californians experienced this week could produce important discoveries that help others avoid the worst in the future.