By George M. Karagiannis, PhD, CEM | Risk and Resilience Director, International Coalition for Sustainable Infrastructure
The recent fires in Los Angeles, California have refocused the public’s attention on wildland firefighting, early warning and evacuation. Of the multiple fires that affected Southern California last January, the Eaton and Palisades fires were the most destructive. The Palisades fire scorched the iconic Pacific Palisades neighborhood, destroying more than 6,000 structures and claiming 12 lives. The Eaton fire started in Eaton Canyon before spreading into Altadena, where it destroyed more than 9,000 structures, including historic buildings, and killed 17 people. Three aspects of the tragedies are of particular importance to emergency management and resilience professionals worldwide.
First and foremost, this series of wildfires occurred in the seasonal antipode of the wildfire season. Wildland fires have been on the rise worldwide, not least because of the combination of the global effects of climate change and decades of unmitigated biomass in forests. The Southern California fires were fueled by ferocious Santa Ana winds and exacerbated by drought conditions in the months leading up to the fires. Although wildfire seasons have been extending before and after their typical April/May to September/October timelines, conditions such as those that drove the Southern California wildfires have been uncommon in the middle of winter, albeit not surprising when one accounts for climate change. Climate projections tell us that this trend will continue and many parts of the world, including the UK, will experience more fires and an increase in events that had until now been dubbed “extreme”.
Second, areas in the wildland-urban interface (WUI) where human development meets wildfires, have been particularly affected. Private sector organisations with operations or even part of their value chain in WUI areas are already being affected by the increase in wildfire risk in these locations. WUI fires destroy organisation assets, disrupt transportation and logistics, affect key suppliers, prevent employees from accessing their workplaces, and cause substantial financial shocks to customers. Business resilience strategies need to account for the increase in wildfire risk in WUI areas and address the potential credit, operational, supply chain and reputation risks that may come with wildfire-related crises.
Third, when WUI fires threaten populated areas, firefighters and emergency management agencies ask people to evacuate using a wide range of communications pathways. As the Eaton fire was approaching Altadena from the east, Los Angeles authorities ordered those in the eastern part of the community to evacuate at 7.26 pm on January 8. However, in western Altadena, the evacuation order was delayed until much later that night. Police officers driving through the area used loudspeakers to warn residents to evacuate at around 2 am, followed by a Wireless Emergency Alert (a system using the same technology as the UK’s Emergency Alert System) at 3.25 am. All of the 17 deaths in the Eaton fire occurred in western Altadena.
Evacuations are among the most complex disaster response operations. On top of that, nighttime evacuations are slower and more complex, for several reasons. First, warnings are disseminated more slowly at night than during the day. Warning messages disseminated by cellphone-based technologies might not be received if devices are not within hearing range of the users, are on silent mode, or are turned off. In addition, people need more time to process warning messages and decide to heed protective action guidance. Second, people need more time to react to the warning message at night, for example, get dressed and gather things to take before leaving their homes. And third, people walk and drive more slowly at night, not least because of fatigue and limited visibility.
Emergency managers are taught to avoid nighttime evacuations when possible. However, avoiding a nighttime evacuation means evacuating during the day before, and this requires advance planning to inform the development of time or land-benchmark triggers for evacuation decision-making. A combination of fire and evacuation modeling can be a powerful tool in this process, but may not be readily available in many fires, especially in the initial attack phase or as the incident begins to expand. Many advanced fire departments integrate fire behavior analysts in their incident command structures; however, these experts are typically on-call and not part of the initial attack. Furthermore, evacuation modeling software is used in many advanced emergency operations centers, but is generally not available at the incident command level. The solution lies in pre-disaster evacuation plans, which identify transportation routes, traffic management measures, transportation modes, and shelter locations, thus helping to set evacuation decision points.
For public sector organisations with operations in WUI areas, this means largely extending the geographical scope of their evacuation plans. Safety regulations in many countries require private sector organisations to develop and test facility evacuation plans for hazards such as building fires, earthquakes, etc. Most of these plans call for employees to evacuate buildings, usually on foot, to some assembly area in an open space near the facility. However, wildfire evacuations will require employees to evacuate over much larger distances to destinations which are not under the firm’s control, over routes that will be congested with evacuation traffic from the surrounding area. In other words, the logistics of wildfire evacuations are an order of magnitude more complex than those of facility evacuations.
Addressing this type of operation entails a fundamental shift from a business continuity mindset to an emergency management approach, or at least a significant expansion of what business continuity entails in Europe today. Building a wildfire evacuation plan requires business resilience professionals to work closely together with their local fire department, police department, and emergency management agency to synchronise emergency response actions. For instance, large employers will require advance notice of evacuation decisions and possibly traffic management measures.
Public alert and warning systems are becoming an increasingly critical link in the process. Modern disaster management doctrine emphasises public information and warning as core emergency response functions. Early disaster research highlighted that to be effective, warning messages need to be received from multiple communication pathways and issued from credible sources. Despite a growing body of research on people’s disaster behaviours and responses, critical knowledge gaps remain about what makes effective public warning systems. Little is known about the socio-economic factors that may affect people’s choice of information sources about possible disasters and which organisation is considered the most trusted source of information.
In an effort to partially address this gap, the International Coalition for Sustainable Infrastructure (Resilience First’s Strategic Partner) and University College London have embarked on a project to operationalise the Lloyd’s Register Foundation World Risk Poll by conducting statistical analysis of the Poll data to identify factors influencing people’s choice of and trust in sources of information about disasters, as well as levels of individual and household preparedness. We hope that our work will make people safer around the world. By creating new knowledge about early warning systems, we will improve skills and education about public warnings. Ultimately, we hope to contribute to climate adaptation, by making people safer from natural disasters, such as hurricanes and wildfires, which are becoming more frequent and more destructive because of climate change.
