Getting Ahead of the Flames
The Case for Proactive Evacuation Planning Against Wind-Driven Fires
In recent years, wildfires have evolved from relatively predictable, forest-based events into fast-moving, wind-driven disasters that impact urban and suburban communities.
These wind-driven fires have led to catastrophic, mass fatality outcomes: 85 lives lost in Paradise, CA, entire neighborhoods destroyed in Maui, and thousands displaced in Boulder, CO, and Los Angeles, CA. Consider these sobering statistics:
(Sources: Camp Fire, Marshall Fire, Maui Wildfires, LA Fires)
Drawing on the lessons learned from these devastating fires, communities have the opportunity to take critical steps to improve their readiness for these catastrophic events. However, effective action starts by clearly understanding the unique risks posed by wind-driven fires.
Understanding The Differences
To highlight what sets wind-driven fires apart, it helps to contrast them with traditional "fuel-driven" wildfires.
Fuel-Driven (Traditional) Wildfires:
Typically occur in remote, forested areas, primarily involving vegetation as the fuel for the fire.
Fires spread relatively slowly (compared to wind-driven fires), allowing more time for firefighting operations and community warnings.
Exhibit generally predictable behavior and progression.
Usually impacts sparsely populated regions, facilitating manageable evacuations.
While these fires can certainly be catastrophic1, wind-driven fires present a fundamentally different and more complex challenge.
Wind-Driven Fires:
Ignite not only vegetation but also entire neighborhoods, adding homes, vehicles, and infrastructure to the material burning.
Spread rapidly due to two key factors: 1. Drought conditions that cause grasslands and vegetation to ignite easily and burn intensely. 2. Extreme winds, often with sustained speeds and gusts between 60 and 80 mph, carry embers far ahead of the primary fire front, causing unpredictable spot fires.
Pose extreme challenges for evacuation due to dense populations, complex infrastructure, and limited warning times. Even well-drilled communities face significant obstacles due to the cumulative time required from the initial recognition of the fire to the initiation of evacuations.2
Recognizing these fundamental differences in wildfire behavior—and the unique operational challenges they pose—is essential for communities seeking to proactively protect the lives of their residents and guests.
What Can Communities Do? Advanced Evacuation Planning
Given the complexity and urgency of wind-driven fires, communities must proactively develop actionable strategies for timely and organized evacuations. While no one-size-fits-all approach or universal playbook yet exists, four critical focus areas can effectively guide evacuation planning. These strategies are drawn from analyses of recent wind-driven fires, detailed reviews of fatality data, and insights from first responders and emergency management professionals actively working to improve their community's readiness.
1. Prioritize Evacuation as the Primary Life-Safety Strategy
In wind-driven fire scenarios, evacuation is typically the primary and often the only realistic option for safeguarding lives. Traditional firefighting methods can be severely constrained when faced with high winds and rapidly spreading fire lines, forcing responders to prioritize rapid evacuation and life safety over property protection.
Even individuals not physically trapped indoors can be exposed to extreme temperatures exceeding 500 degrees Fahrenheit as homes and vehicles burn.
While temporary fire refuge areas should be identified during planning as a last-resort measure to save life, people waiting in these areas for a fire to burn past are still exposed to heat, suffocating smoke, and other hazards.
Proactive evacuation planning can significantly reduce the number of fatalities experienced during evacuation, even when some individuals choose not to evacuate immediately.
2. Adapt Firefighting Tactics to Support Evacuation
Tactical firefighting remains essential even during the most severe wind-driven fires. Responders must focus not only on direct fire suppression but also on slowing or redirecting the spread of fire (when possible), protecting critical infrastructure, and securing safe evacuation routes.
Resource allocation should dynamically adapt: some firefighting teams may be tasked with supporting the evacuation of high-risk sites, such as hospitals, schools, or assisted living facilities; others might establish defensible perimeters or reinforce safe evacuation routes and temporary refuge locations.
Recognizing this adaptability is vital for creating responsive and integrated firefighting and evacuation plans.
In wind-driven conditions, sheltering in place is rarely feasible. While "protect-in-place" can be an option, this approach significantly alters resource allocation by assigning dedicated firefighting units to protect facilities unable to evacuate.
3. Conduct Advanced, Locally Informed Evacuation Planning
Leverage advanced technology and AI-driven simulation tools. Increasingly available AI tools can accurately simulate and calculate evacuation times, offering valuable starting points for planning. Simulations enable communities to establish benchmarks, test evacuation strategies, and assess their effectiveness quickly and cost-effectively.
Localize the plan. AI-generated models must be integrated with real-world, local knowledge to ensure that plans reflect actual road conditions, population density, behavioral tendencies, and community-specific characteristics.
Strengthen notification and communication processes. Communities must develop clear, reliable, and multi-channel alert systems that can be rapidly deployed. Accounting for inherent challenges such as power outages, network overloads, or limited cell coverage, redundant communication strategies can provide wide exposure to evacuation guidance.
Integrate mutual-aid resources proactively. Plan for the continuous, seamless integration of external emergency resources to augment local responders. Collaborate closely with utility providers to ensure key evacuation routes remain open, and clearly understand their decision-making processes for proactively de-energizing the electrical grid.
Explicitly plan for human behavior. Realistically anticipate evacuation delays and disruptions caused by residents returning home for belongings or family members, limited visibility due to smoke, traffic accidents, blocked roads from fallen power lines, and panic-induced congestion.
4. Invest in Community Preparedness
Recognize the challenge of overcoming residents' hesitation or refusal to evacuate. Individuals often underestimate the fire risk or overestimate the ability of emergency services to rescue them, creating dangerous delays.
Educate communities explicitly about the psychological barriers to evacuation, emphasizing the critical importance of taking rapid action.
Promote tools and resources (such as Watch Duty) to enhance community awareness, ensuring residents receive timely information about fire starts, even before official evacuation orders are issued.
Clearly communicate the critical importance of responding immediately to evacuation alerts. Recent AI modeling has shown that delays of just 20-30 minutes in leaving can triple or even quadruple (or more) evacuation travel times compared to those who depart immediately. Residents must prepare in advance, stay informed, and be ready to leave quickly.
Implementing these focused planning efforts significantly enhances community readiness, better positions first responders, and ultimately improves the likelihood of safe, timely evacuations during wind-driven fires.
Closing
Wildfires of the past taught us about fire behavior and fire lines, but the wind-driven fires of today are teaching us critical lessons about evacuation timing, communication, and the importance of early, informed action by first responders and community members.
The convergence of drought conditions, densely developed areas, and extreme winds has made fires increasingly catastrophic, unpredictable, and deadly. At times, these fires resemble flash floods more than traditional wildfires.
Planning for such complex incidents is challenging, as there is no definitive playbook to follow. Yet the cost of inaction is too great and far outweighs the challenge of preparedness. Through deliberate and proactive planning, communities can significantly enhance resilience, save lives, and establish standards of preparedness that others can follow.
Fuel-driven fires in rugged terrain or under severe drought conditions can become highly unpredictable, rapidly shifting from slow-moving to explosive behavior. This distinction shouldn't minimize the unpredictable nature that traditional fires can also exhibit.
Consider the timeline involved:
Time required for someone to report the initial fire.
Dispatching and travel time for firefighting resources.
Firefighters assessing and forecasting fire behavior.
Decision-making and communication processes initiating evacuation alerts.
Time needed for dispatch to process and broadcast evacuation alerts.
Residents receiving alerts, processing information, communicating with neighbors, gathering essentials, and leaving their homes.
All of these critical activities must happen before evacuation can effectively begin. Delays at any stage can compound quickly, with life-threatening consequences.
