As wildfires ravaged Los Angeles neighborhoods this week, residents and authorities faced a heartbreaking and nearly impossible challenge: convincing hundreds of thousands of people to leave their homes to escape danger, within hours , or even a few minutes.
In doing so, officials put years of research into wildfire evacuations into practice. The field is small but growing, reflecting recent studies this suggests that the frequency of extreme fires has more than doubled since 2023. This growth has been driven by terrible fires in the western United States, Canada and Russia.
“Certainly the interest [in evacuation research] has increased due to the frequency of wildfires,” says Asad Ali, an engineering doctoral student at North Dakota State University whose work has focused on this area. “We’re seeing more posts, more articles.”
When evacuations go wrong, they go really wrong. In the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles, panicked drivers stuck in traffic abandoned their vehicles in the middle of evacuation routes, leaving emergency crews unable to reach the fires. Authorities used bulldozers to push back empty cars.
To avoid this kind of chaos, researchers are trying to answer some basic but crucial questions: Who reacts to what type of warnings? And when are people most likely to be out of danger?
Many researchers’ ideas about evacuations come from other types of disasters: from studies of residents’ reactions to floods, nuclear disasters, volcanic eruptions, and especially hurricanes.
But hurricanes and wildfires differ in obvious and less obvious ways. Hurricanes are typically more violent and affect entire regions, which may require many states and agencies to work together to help people travel greater distances. But hurricanes are also relatively predictable and slow-moving, and tend to give authorities much more time to organize escapes and develop phased evacuation strategies so that everyone doesn’t hit the road at once. Wildfires are less predictable and require rapid communications.
People’s decisions to leave or stay are also influenced by an inconvenient fact: Residents who stay during hurricanes can do little to prevent disaster. But for those who stay in the haze of wildfires to defend their homes with garden hoses or water, the strategy can sometimes work. “Psychologically, evacuating during a forest fire is very difficult,” says Asad.
Research so far suggests that responses to wildfires and whether people choose to stay, leave, or even just wait a while may be determined by a number of factors: whether residents have already been warned of forest fires and whether authorities have the warnings preceded the actual threats; how the emergency is communicated to them; and how the neighbors around them react.
A investigation A 2017 and 2018 study of some 500 people evacuated by California wildfires found that some longtime residents who have already experienced numerous wildfires are less likely to evacuate, but others have does exactly the opposite. Overall, low-income people were less likely to flee, perhaps due to limited access to transportation or places to stay. These types of surveys can be used by authorities to create models that tell them when to ask which people to evacuate.
One of the current difficulties in wildfire evacuation research is that researchers don’t necessarily categorize wildfires as “extreme weather,” says Kendra K. Levine, director of the Wildfire Library. the UC Berkeley Institute for Transportation Studies. Santa Ana winds in Southern California, for example, are not unusual. They happen every year. But combine the winds with the region’s historic drought — and likely linked to climate change — and wildfires start to look more like weather. “People are starting to accept” this relationship, Levine says, which has sparked more interest and scholarship among those who specialize in extreme weather.
Asad, the North Dakota researcher, says he’s already had meetings about using data collected from this week’s disasters to use in future research. There’s a slight glimmer of hope: The horror Californians experienced this week could produce important findings that help others avoid the worst in the future.
