as forest fire Bored on the whole neighborhood Los Angeles This week, residents and officials faced a daunting and almost impossible challenge: getting hundreds of thousands of people to leave their homes to escape danger, even within hours or minutes.
In doing so, officials practiced years of research into wildfire evacuation. The farm is small but growing, reflected Recent studies which suggest that the frequency of extreme fires has more than doubled since 2023. Growth has been led by wildfires in the western United States, Canada and Russia.
“Definitely interested [in evacuation research] The frequency of wildfires has increased,” says Asad Ali, an engineering doctoral student at North Dakota State University whose work focuses on the area. “We’re seeing more publications, more articles.”
When emissions go wrong, they really go wrong. In LA’s Pacific Palisades neighborhood, terrified drivers stuck in traffic left their vehicles in the middle of evacuation routes, leaving emergency crews unable to reach the fire. officer Used bulldozers To push empty cars out of the way.
To prevent such chaos, researchers are trying to answer some basic but critical questions: Who reacts to what kinds of warnings? And when are people likely to get out of harm’s way?
Many of the researchers’ ideas about evacuation come from other types of disasters—from studies of residents’ reactions to floods, nuclear disasters, or volcanic eruptions, and Especially storms.
But hurricanes and wildfires differ in some obvious, and less obvious, ways. Hurricanes are usually large and affect entire regions, which can require many states and agencies to work together to help people travel long distances. But storms are also relatively predictable and slow-moving, giving officials plenty of time to organize evacuations and strategize about phased evacuations, so that everyone isn’t on the road at once. Wildfires are unpredictable and require rapid communication.
People’s decisions to move or stay are also affected by an inconvenient fact: Residents who live during a hurricane can’t do much to prevent the disaster. But for those who live in the midst of a wildfire to protect their homes with hoses or water, the gambit sometimes works. “Psychologically, it’s very difficult to put out a wildfire,” says Asad.
Research so far suggests that reactions to wildfires, and whether people choose to stay, go, or wait a while, can be determined by many things: whether residents have experienced wildfires before; Have gone through the warnings, and were they warnings. After actual threats; how they are being told about the emergency; And how the neighbors around them react.
one survey Some 500 California wildfire evacuations conducted in 2017 and 2018 found that some longtime residents who have experienced many past wildfire events are less likely to evacuate—but others has done the exact opposite. Overall, low-income people were less likely to flee, possibly because of limited access to transportation or places to live. Surveys like these can be used by officials to build models that tell them which people to evict.
Library Director of the Institute of Transportation Studies at UC Berkeley, Kendra K. Levine says one of the difficulties in wildfire evacuation research right now is that researchers don’t necessarily classify wildfire events into the “extreme weather” category. Southern California’s Santa Ana winds, for example, are not uncommon. They happen every year. But combine the winds with the region’s historic—and likely climate-change-related—dryness, and wildfires start to look like weather. “People are starting to come to terms”, Levin says, which has led to greater interest and scholarship among those who specialize in extreme weather.
Assad, the North Dakota researcher, says he’s already had meetings about using data collected during this week’s disasters in future research. It’s a faint silver lining that what Californians experienced this week could lead to important discoveries that will help others avoid the worst in the future.
