The evolving (and imprecise) science of wildland fire avoidance

as forest fires took refuge in the next quarters Los Angeles This week, residents and authorities faced a difficult and nearly impossible challenge: persuading hundreds of thousands of people to leave their homes to escape danger within hours or even minutes.

In doing so, officials followed years of research into wildfire evacuations. The area is small, but growing, reflecting recent studies This indicates that the frequency of extreme fires has more than doubled since 2023. The growth was caused by terrible fires in the western United States, Canada and Russia.

“Obviously the interest (in evacuation research) has increased because of the frequency of wildfires,” said Asad Ali, a doctoral student in engineering at North Dakota State University whose work focuses on the area. “We see more publications, more articles.”

When evacuations go wrong, they really do. In LA’s Pacific Palisades neighborhood, drivers stuck in traffic left their cars in the middle of evacuation routes, preventing emergency crews from reaching fires. Authorities used bulldozers to remove empty vehicles from the road.

To avoid such chaos, researchers are trying to answer some basic but critical questions: Who responds to which alerts? But when are people most likely to escape harm?

Many of the researchers’ insights into evacuation come from other types of disasters—studying residents’ reactions to floods, nuclear disasters, or volcanic eruptions. especially hurricanes.

But hurricanes and wildfires differ in some obvious and less obvious ways. Hurricanes are usually larger and affect entire regions, which can require many states and agencies to work together to help people travel longer distances. But hurricanes are also relatively predictable and slow-moving, giving authorities more time to organize evacuations and develop a phased evacuation strategy so that not everyone is out at once. Forest fires are less predictable and require rapid communication.

People’s decisions to go or stay are also affected by an unfortunate fact: Residents who stay behind during hurricanes can’t do much to prevent disaster. But for those caught in the middle of wildfires to protect their homes with hoses or water, the gambit sometimes works. “Psychologically, wildfire evacuation is very difficult,” says Asad.

Research so far shows that responses to wildfires and whether people choose to stay, go, or just wait a while can be determined by many things: whether residents have had prior wildfire warnings and whether or not those warnings happened. followed by actual threats; how to communicate the emergency situation to them; and how surrounding neighbors react.

one request Results from nearly 500 California wildfire evacuations in 2017 and 2018 found that some longtime residents who had previously experienced multiple wildfires were less likely to evacuate, but others did the opposite. Overall, low-income people were less likely to run away, possibly because of limited transportation or places to stay. Such surveys can be used by authorities to create models that tell which people to evacuate and when.

Kendra K. Levine, library director at UC Berkeley’s Institute for Transportation Studies, says one challenge in wildfire evacuation research right now is that researchers don’t necessarily categorize wildfire events as “extreme weather.” For example, Southern California’s Santa Ana winds are not uncommon. They happen every year. But combine the winds with the region’s historical and possibly climate-change-related dryness, and wildfires start to look more like weather. “People are starting to come to terms with the relationship,” says Levine, which has led to more interest and scholarship among those specializing in extreme weather.

Assad, a North Dakota researcher, says he has held meetings this week about using disaster data in future research. It’s a faint silver lining that the horror Californians experienced this week may yield important findings that will help others avoid the worst in the future.