As wildfires raged through Los Angeles neighborhoods this week, residents and authorities faced a harrowing 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 put into practice years of research on wildfire evacuations. The field is small but growing, which reflects recent studies That suggests the frequency of extreme fires has more than doubled since 2023. The growth has been led by terrible fires in the western United States, Canada and Russia.
“Interest (in evacuation research) has definitely increased because of the frequency of wildfires,” says 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 bowel movements go wrong, they really go wrong. In the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles, terrified 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 move empty cars out of the way.
To avoid this kind of chaos, researchers are trying to answer some basic but critical questions: Who reacts to what kinds of warnings? And when are people most likely to get out of harm’s way?
Many of 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 some obvious and less obvious ways. Hurricanes are typically larger and affect entire regions, which may require many states and agencies to work together to help people travel longer distances. But hurricanes are also relatively predictable and slow, and tend to give authorities much more time to organize escapes and strategize gradual evacuations so that not everyone hits the road at the same time. Wildfires are less predictable and require rapid communications.
People’s decisions to leave or stay are also affected by an inconvenient fact: Residents who stay during hurricanes can’t do much to prevent disaster. But for those who remain in the midst of wildfires to defend their homes with hoses or water, the tactic can sometimes work. “From a psychological point of view, evacuation from forest fires is very difficult,” says Asad.
So far, research suggests that reactions to wildfires — and whether people choose to stay, leave or just wait a while — can be determined by a lot of things: whether residents have received wildfire warnings before and whether authorities warnings preceded actual threats; how the emergency is communicated to them; and how the neighbors around them react.
One survey of about 500 California wildfire evacuees conducted in 2017 and 2018 found that some longtime residents who have experienced many previous wildfire incidents are less likely to evacuate, but others did exactly the opposite. In general, low-income people were less likely to flee, possibly due to limited access to transportation or places to stay. Authorities can use these types of surveys to create models that tell them when to tell which people to evacuate.
One difficulty in wildfire evacuation research right now is that researchers don’t necessarily classify wildfires in the “extreme weather” category, says Kendra K. Levine, director of the UC Institute of Transportation Studies library. Berkeley. Santa Ana winds in Southern California, for example, are not unusual. They happen every year. But combine the winds with the region’s historic dryness (and likely related to climate change), and wildfires start to look more like the weather. “People are starting to accept” the relationship, Levine says, which has generated more interest and study among those who specialize in extreme weather.
Asad, the North Dakota researcher, says he has already had meetings about using data collected during this week’s disasters for use in future research. It’s a faint glimmer of hope that the horror Californians experienced this week may yield important findings that will help others avoid the worst in the future.