As wildfires rage across Los Angeles this week, residents and authorities face a painful and nearly impossible challenge. Convincing hundreds of thousands of people to leave their homes in a matter of hours or even minutes to escape danger.
In doing so, officials put years of research into wildfire evacuation into action. The field is small but growing. Recent research This suggests that the frequency of extreme fires has more than doubled since 2023. The increase was driven by devastating fires in the western United States, Canada and Russia.
“Definitely interested [in evacuation research] Wildfire burns have increased as the frequency of wildfire burns has increased,” says Asad Ali, a doctoral student in engineering at North Dakota State University who focuses on the field. “We are seeing more publications and more articles.”
When evacuation goes wrong, it goes really wrong. In Los Angeles’ Pacific Palisades neighborhood, panicked drivers abandoned their vehicles in the middle of the evacuation route, preventing emergency responders from reaching the fire scene. authorities used bulldozer Pushing an empty car.
To prevent this kind of confusion, researchers are attempting to answer some basic yet important questions. Who responds to what kinds of warnings? And when are people most likely to escape danger?
Many of researchers’ ideas about evacuation come from other types of disasters, including studies of people’s reactions to floods, nuclear disasters, volcanic eruptions and, especially, hurricanes.
But hurricanes and wildfires differ in some obvious and less obvious ways. Because hurricanes are typically larger and affect entire regions, many states and agencies may need to work together to help people travel longer distances. But hurricanes tend to be relatively predictable and slow-moving, giving authorities much more time to organize evacuations and come up with phased evacuation strategies to ensure everyone doesn’t hit the road at once. Wildfires are difficult to predict and require rapid communication.
People’s decisions to leave or stay are also influenced by inconvenient facts. Residents who stay during a hurricane cannot do much to prevent disaster. But for people protecting their homes with hoses or water during wildfires, this strategy can sometimes work. “Psychologically, wildfire evacuation is very difficult,” says Asad.
Research to date has shown that reactions to bushfires and whether people stay, move or wait a while may be determined by whether residents have previously received bushfire warnings and whether those warnings have been applied. Real threats ensue. how the emergency is communicated to them; And how the surrounding neighbors react.
one inspection Among nearly 500 California wildfire evacuees surveyed in 2017 and 2018, some long-term residents who had experienced many previous wildfire incidents were less likely to evacuate, while others were just the opposite. Overall, low-income people were less likely to flee because they had limited access to transportation or places to stay. Authorities can use these kinds of surveys to create models that tell which people should evacuate and when.
One difficulty with current wildfire evacuation research is that researchers don’t necessarily classify wildfire events into the “extreme weather” category, says Kendra K. Levine, library director at the UC Berkeley Transportation Research Institute. For example, Santa Ana winds are not uncommon in Southern California. It happens every year. But when winds are combined with the region’s historic dryness (possibly related to climate change), wildfires start to look more like weather. “People are starting to accept this relationship,” says Levine. This has led to increased interest and scholarship among those specializing in extreme climates.
Asad, the North Dakota researcher, said he already has reservations about using data collected during this state’s disaster in future research. There is a glimmer of hope that the horror experienced by Californians this week may have important consequences that will help others avoid the worst in the future.
