As Forest fire bored in the neighborhood los angeles This week, residents and officials faced a terrifying and nearly impossible challenge: convincing hundreds of thousands of people to leave their homes to escape danger, in a matter of hours or even minutes.
In doing so, officials drew on years of research in the field of wildfire prevention. The area is small but growing, reflecting recent studies This shows that the frequency of extreme fires has more than doubled since 2023. This increase has been caused by severe fires in the western United States, Canada and Russia.
“Definitely interested [in evacuation research] “Wildfires have increased because of the frequency with which they burn,” says Asad Ali, an engineering doctoral student at North Dakota State University whose work focuses on the region. “We're seeing more publications, more articles.”
When withdrawals go wrong, they go really wrong. In L.A.'s Pacific Palisades neighborhood, panicked drivers stuck in traffic abandoned their vehicles in the middle of evacuation routes, leaving emergency crews unable to reach the fire. authority used bulldozer To move empty cars out of the way.
To prevent this kind of chaos, researchers are trying to answer some basic but important questions: Who responds to what types of alerts? And when are people most likely to move out of harm's way?
Many of researchers' ideas about evacuation come from other types of disasters—from studies of residents' reactions to floods, nuclear disasters, or volcanic eruptions, and especially storm,
But hurricanes and wildfires differ in some obvious and less obvious ways. Hurricanes are usually large and affect an entire area, which may require multiple states and agencies to work together to help people travel long distances. But storms are also relatively predictable and slow-moving, giving officials more time to organize evacuations and strategize about phased evacuations so that not everyone is on the streets at once. Wildfires are unpredictable and require quick communication.
People's decisions to leave or stay are also influenced by an inconvenient fact: Residents who stay during a storm can't do much to prevent disaster. But for those who live in the midst of a wildfire, this trick sometimes works to protect their homes with pipes or water. “Psychologically, wildfire survival is very difficult,” Asad says.
Research so far suggests that reactions to wildfires, and whether people choose to stay, go, or just wait a little longer, may be determined by several things: Whether residents are alerted to wildfire warnings earlier; faced, and whether those warnings were followed by actual threats; how they are being informed about the emergency; And how their surrounding neighbors react.
One survey A study of nearly 500 California wildfire evacuations conducted in 2017 and 2018 found that some longtime residents who had experienced multiple previous wildfire events were less likely to evacuate — but others were. Did exactly the opposite. Overall, low-income people were less likely to migrate, possibly due to limited access to transportation or places to live. These types of surveys can be used by officials to create models that tell them when to instruct which people to evacuate.
Kendra K., library director of the Institute of Transportation Studies at UC Berkeley. Levin says one difficulty with wildfire evacuation research right now is that researchers don't necessarily put wildfire events into the “extreme weather” category. For example, the Santa Ana winds of Southern California are not uncommon. They happen every year. But combine the winds with the region's historic and potentially climate-change-related aridity, and wildfires start to look like weather. “People are beginning to adjust to the relationship,” says Levin, which has led to greater interest and scholarship among those who specialize in extreme weather.
Assad, the North Dakota researcher, says he has already had meetings about using data collected during this week's disasters in future research. It's a faint ray of hope that the horror Californians have experienced this week may lead to important findings that will help others avoid the worst in the future.