As wildfires raged through neighborhoods across Los Angeles this week, residents and authorities faced a difficult and nearly impossible challenge: convincing hundreds of thousands of people to leave their homes to escape the danger, in a matter of hours or minutes.
In doing so, officials are using years of research into wildfire emissions. The field is small but growing, with recent research suggesting that the frequency of dangerous fires will double by 2023. The increase has been led by wildfires in the western United States, Canada, and Russia.
“Definitely 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 field. “We’re seeing more books, more titles.”
When the release goes wrong, it really isn’t right. In LA’s Pacific Palisades neighborhood, panicked drivers stuck in traffic abandoned their cars in the middle of the exit lanes, leaving emergency crews unable to reach the fire. Authorities used bulldozers to push empty cars off the road.
In order to prevent this type of chaos, researchers are trying to answer some basic but critical questions: Who responds to what kind of warnings? And when do people usually get out of danger?
Most of the researchers’ ideas about evacuations 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 not so obvious, ways. Hurricanes are often large and affect entire regions, which can require many states and agencies to work together to help people move long distances. But storms are also predictable and slow, and often give authorities more time to plan escapes and strategize evacuations, so that everyone doesn’t hit the road at once. Wildfires are very unpredictable and require quick communication.
People’s decisions to move or stay are also affected by a simple fact: Residents who live during hurricanes can’t do much to prevent disaster. But for those living in the middle of wildfires to protect their homes with hoses or water, the gambit sometimes works. “Psychologically, getting out of a wildfire is very difficult,” Asad said.
Research so far suggests that wildfire response, and whether people choose to stay, walk, or just wait a while, can be determined by a number of factors: whether residents have experienced wildfire warnings before, and whether those warnings are followed by real threats; how the emergency is communicated to them; and how the neighbors around them react.
Another study of 500 California wildfire evacuees conducted in 2017 and 2018 found that some longtime residents who had experienced multiple previous wildfires were less likely to evacuate—but others did the exact opposite. Overall, low-income people were less likely to flee, perhaps due to limited access to transportation or housing. This type of survey can be used by the authorities to create models that tell them they should order which people to evacuate.
Another difficulty in wildfire outbreak research right now is that researchers don’t classify wildfire events in the “extreme weather” category, said Kendra K. Levine, director of the library at the Institute of Transportation Studies at UC Berkeley. Southern California’s Santa Ana winds, for example, are not unusual. They happen every year. But combine the winds with the region’s drought—also likely related to climate change—and wildfires start to look like weather. “People are starting to get comfortable” with the relationship, Levine said, which has led to greater interest and learning among those who specialize in severe weather.
Asad, a researcher from North Dakota, says he has already had meetings about using data collected during this week’s disasters in future research. It is a faint silver lining, that the horrors Californians experienced this week may yield important discoveries that will help others avoid the worst in the future.
Source link
