The evolving (and absurd) science of escaping wildfires

as fire Bored down on laying across Los Angeles This week, residents and authorities faced a daunting and almost impossible challenge: persuading hundreds of thousands of people to leave their homes to escape danger within hours or even minutes.

To do this, officials practiced years of research on fire evacuation. The field is small but growing, reflective Recent research That suggests the frequency of extreme wildfires has more than doubled since 2023. Increased wildfires in the western United States, Canada, and Russia.

“Obviously the wildfires have increased interest (in location research),” said Asad Ali, an engineering doctoral student at North Dakota State University, whose work has focused on the field. “We’re seeing more publications, more articles.”

When evictions are wrong, they are really wrong. In L.A.’s Pacific Palisades neighborhood, panicked drivers stuck in traffic abandoned their vehicles in the middle of evacuation routes, before emergency crews could reach the blaze. Authority Used bulldozers Push the empty car off the road.

To prevent this kind of chaos, researchers are trying to answer some basic but critical questions: Who responds to what kinds of warnings? And when are people more likely to get out of harm’s way?

Many of the researchers’ ideas about migration come from other types of disasters—from studies of residents’ responses to floods, nuclear disasters, or volcanic eruptions; and Especially hurricanes.

But hurricanes and wildfires differ in some obvious, and less obvious, ways. Hurricanes are usually large and affect entire regions, requiring many states and agencies to work together to help people travel long distances. But hurricanes are also relatively predictable and slow-moving, and give authorities plenty of time to organize escapes and strategize evacuations, so that everyone doesn’t hit the streets at once. Fires are less predictable and require faster communication.

People’s decisions to go or stay are also affected by an inconvenient truth: Residents who stay during hurricanes can’t do much to prevent disaster. But the gambit sometimes works for those in the midst of wildfires to protect their homes with hoses or water. “Psychologically, it’s very difficult to put out a fire,” Asad said.

The research so far suggests that the response to wildfires, and whether people choose to stay, go, or wait a while, can be determined by a number of things: whether residents have experienced wildfire warnings before, and whether those warnings were in place. followed by actual threats; how emergencies are being communicated to them; And how their surrounding neighbors react.

one Survey Nearly 500 California wildfire evacuations conducted in 2017 and 2018 found that some longtime residents who had previously experienced a lot of wildfires were less likely to move — but others did just the opposite. Overall, low-income people were less likely to flee, possibly because of limited access to transportation or lodging. These types of surveys can be used by authorities to build models that tell them when to move people.

One difficulty with wildfire evacuation research right now is that researchers don’t necessarily categorize wildfire events as “extreme weather,” said Kendra K., director of the library at UC Berkeley’s Institute of Transportation Studies. Levine said. Southern California’s Santa Ana winds, for example, are not unusual. They happen every year. But combine the wind with the region’s historic—and possibly climate-change-related—drought, and the wildfires start to look like weather. “The relationship with people is beginning to follow,” Levin says, leading to more interest and scholarship among experts in extreme weather.

Asad, the North Dakota researcher, said he has already had meetings about using data collected during this week’s disaster in future research. It’s a faint silver lining, that the horror Californians experienced this week could lead to important findings that will help others avoid the worst in the future.