As wildfires raged across Los Angeles this week, residents and authorities faced an almost impossible task: convincing hundreds of thousands of people to leave their homes to escape danger within hours and even minutes. faced with close and difficult challenges.
In doing so, officials put years of research into wildfire evacuation into practice. The field is small but growing, reflecting recent research that suggests the frequency of extreme fires will more than double from 2023 onwards. This growth is being driven by severe fires in the western United States, Canada, and Russia.
“There’s definitely an increased interest[in evacuation research]because wildfires are occurring more frequently,” says a North Dakota State University engineering professor whose research focuses on this area. says Asad Ali, a doctoral student. “There are more publications and articles.”
If the evacuation fails, it really fails. In the Pacific Palisades area of Los Angeles, panicked drivers were stuck in traffic and abandoned their cars midway through evacuation routes, preventing emergency crews from reaching the scene of the fire. Authorities used bulldozers to dislodge empty cars.
To prevent this kind of confusion, researchers are trying to answer some basic but important questions: Who responds to what kinds of warnings? And when are people most likely to flee danger?
Many of researchers’ ideas about evacuation come from other types of disasters, such as studies of population reactions to floods, nuclear disasters, volcanic eruptions, and especially hurricanes.
But hurricanes and wildfires differ in obvious and not-so-obvious ways. Because hurricanes are typically larger and affect entire regions, many states and agencies may need to work together to help people travel long distances. But hurricanes are relatively predictable and slow-moving, giving authorities much more time to plan evacuations or develop strategies for phased evacuations so everyone isn’t on the road at once. There is a tendency. Wildfires are less predictable and require rapid communication.
Decisions about whether people go or stay there are also influenced by the inconvenient fact that residents who stay during a hurricane can do little to prevent the disaster. But for people who are in the middle of a wildfire and use hoses and water to protect their homes, this tactic can sometimes work. “Psychologically, wildfire evacuation is very difficult,” Assad says.
Previous research has shown that responses to wildfires, and whether people choose to stay, leave, or just wait a while, depend on whether residents have experienced previous wildfire warnings and whether the warning This suggests that it may be determined by a variety of factors, including whether or not it occurred in the past. Then comes the actual threat. How are emergencies being communicated to them? And how will the surrounding neighbors react?
A survey of nearly 500 wildfire evacuees in California in 2017 and 2018 found that some longtime residents who had experienced multiple wildfire events in the past were less likely to evacuate. It turns out that some people are low, but others are completely the opposite. Overall, people in low-income groups were less likely to evacuate, likely because they had limited access to transportation and a place to stay. This type of research can be used to create models that tell authorities when to tell which people to evacuate.
One of the difficulties in studying wildfire evacuations right now is that researchers don’t necessarily classify wildfire outbreaks into the category of “extreme weather,” said David E., library director at the University of California, Berkeley’s Transportation Research Institute. , says Kendra K. Levin. For example, Santa Ana winds in Southern California are not uncommon. They happen every year. But when you combine these winds with the region’s historic and perhaps climate change-related dryness, wildfires start to look more like weather. “People are starting to accept this relationship,” Levine said, leading to increased interest and scholarship among extreme weather experts.
Assad, the North Dakota researcher, said he is already having meetings about using data collected from this week’s disaster in future research. There’s a glimmer of hope that the horrors Californians experienced this week may yield important discoveries that can help others avoid the worst in the future.