Australian here. Australia has different wild/bushfires in that the morning is always safe (at least as far as we know for the last 100 years) and easy to evacuate, the danger is in the afternoon. So there is a simple strategy that will always work, let's call it the "Westfield" strategy. If there is elevated risk, grab your irreplaceable and head to your nearest Westfield shopping centre for lunch in the food court. Then see a movie. Then attempt to go home. If your house didn't burn down then I hope you enjoyed your day out. If it did you are still alive. The problem though with this strategy is that chances are, and indeed amply demonstrated by the Victorian 2009 bushfires is that a large number of homes were threatened but only a very small proportion of towns and homes under threat were actually destroyed. Australia being inhabited by happy go-lucky gambler types brings out the worst in us, so people will chance it. (and add to that those without insurance who will stay to protect their asset as they are in a bind)
As to the US, no-one has ever died in traffic save for one single example I found in one canyon fire in California where a police cruiser assisting with evacuations crashed into a tree and blocked the road [You should expect once one person crashes, the next person will crash into them due to poor visibility] and the other end of the road was blocked by the fire and I think some roadworks, I'd need to look it up. That aside evacuation is much safer than "stay in place" particularly as the latter requires a great deal of mental fortitude to remain focussed in dense smoke and loud noise [people fail to do simple things and die], little own having a structure that will provide survivable conditions.
Roads can move a huge number of people even in cars. The only exception to this is to my understanding, again in California where there is a valley with a freeway through it but too many residences and I think limited capacity getting on to the freeway to evacuate everyone quickly.
Takeaway - evacuate early, nobody ever died from evacuating needlessly. Remember its just "stuff", possessions are not worth risking your life.
> Takeaway - evacuate early, nobody ever died from evacuating needlessly.
That's simply not true. The evacuations of Fukushima Daiichi have come under substantial criticism [1] for causing unnecessary harm, including deaths. Not everyone is a young and healthy mobile person able to evacuate and return home unaffected, especially if you consider the living conditions they must endure during the evacuation - not everyone can afford a hotel.
> As to the US, no-one has ever died in traffic save for one single example I found in one canyon fire in California where a police cruiser assisting with evacuations crashed into a tree and blocked the road
The example you quote is (bar one) people moving as pedestrians rather than with the protection of a vehicle. A vehicle offers a great deal of protection, particularly now with air-conditioning available to give a buffer against the heat. Also a slow moving vehicle moves a lot faster (away from danger) than a fast moving pedestrian. I remember a film, probably made in the 1950's (one of those Magnesium Chloride in your everyday life type thing) about "Always stay in the car in a bushfire, cover yourself with blankets and then put out the fires on the car when the fire has past". If you are out of a vehicle in a bushfire you need to dress appropriately to deal with the radiant heat, long trousers, long sleeves, hat etc. As bushfires are associated with hot weather, sadly, people particularly children are made much more vulnerable by wearing bathers (swimming trunks) and short sleeves when moving. Firefighters cover up with clothing for to deal with the radiant heat, among other things.
Can I please point out that the radiated heat from a fire will indeed kill the shit out of you even with your air-conditioner running. If you're within safe evacuation times, the car is a good bet, but if you're past the safe evacuation time you'd have better chances by staying put and making do with what you have.
Being trapped in a firestorm is a terrifying experience, it sounds like it's a damn good thing your uncle had the sense to find a safe place to take shelter!
He was based at the Fiskville training facility for a few years which would have been around that time and explain how he was at Macedon; prior to that he was a station chief so quite experienced.
The way he described the houses around them imploding and how the fire would rush out, take something and then suck back into itself sounded like a nightmare.
It was enough for him to have left the CFA a few years later.
From the Wikipedia article on the 1991 Oakland Hills fire:
"Additionally, many narrow, winding roads in the area were crowded with parked cars, including many in front of fire hydrants; this prevented fire trucks and ambulances from getting to certain areas and connecting fire hoses."
Not an Australian but as I understood it the winds pick up during the afternoon causing the fires the spread really fast. Basically you want to be at a safe place when the fire is moving fast.
For first hand accounts and excellent reporting on the Camp fire take a look at the Blancolirio channel on YouTube.
Juan Brown does some great work and has some very interesting content, such as exclusive access to the VLAT refueling and refilling operation, a 50+ minute interview with one of the nurses that helped evacuate the hospital, and he lives just 40 miles from the fire, so lived it's effects.
He also has some truly brilliant content on the Oroville Dam, the near disaster and the subsequent multi year rebuild project.
I don't blame them -- I've never been in a wildfire or imminent disaster situation, but my impression is that the majority of the people who've died in the fire didn't die because they were completely ignorant of the fire until it was suddenly upon them. They are aware of the warnings, but don't believe until it's too late that they are in imminent danger. So I don't think the victims as being particularly irrational, just particularly unlucky.
I've watched this video, and I've seen it shared frequently with people highlighting exclusively the "dumb" woman and her makeup, as if that seemingly superficial decision by her was the thing that led to her tragic death. There were others who died at that gate in the fire, and they all made decisions just as superficial as wanting to put on makeup beforehand -- I mean, in the way that every delaying decision is incredibly superficial when we consider it in retrospect.
There was a famous fire in a mall where most of the people who died were in one particular restaurant.
It's because they all tried to pay before they left, the lost time killed them.
The idea haunts me because it was 100% the correct thing to do, they had no idea how bad the fire would be. I even know this design flaw but I still would queue to pay before leaving if a fire alarm went off in a mall.
The fire alarm went off during one of my final exams at university.
Immediately the invigilator shouted "stay seated, we wait for confirmation", but within a few seconds a security guard ran into the room and shouted "please leave immediately".
There was a fire, but I assume this process was in place to take account of people trying to disrupt the examination. I don't know how long the invigilator would have waited for security.
The invigilators tried to find everyone outside and keep us together without discussion, but that was unrealistic in Central London, there is too little open space.
Fire fighters extinguished the fire within about half an hour, and we finished the exam.
I was in a line at immigration in an airport when the fire alarm went off. Everyone pretended it wasn't happening. I remember thinking everyone in here is dead if its real - Imagine the stampede that would form.
This is the key quote: “I don’t know that you could build the infrastructure to evacuate an entire town that quickly,”
I don't feel like this is thought through, not for the wildfires, not for the hurricanes. How do you move 100,000 people out? A little paper exercise should suggest the scale of this problem, and how unprepared everyone is.
The interstate highways were partially designed to be able to evacuate large cities in the case of a nuclear attack. As anyone who has traveled on such roads during rush hour can well attest, their ability to do so is quite lacking.
In modern times, the one major natural disaster we have that can be reasonably well predicted ahead of time to afford lengthy evacuation times is a major hurricane. We discovered during Hurricane Ike, however, that even a large city with ample lead time and comprehensive evacuation planning (including lane reversal plans to maximize egress capacity) cannot be adequately evacuated for a hurricane.
What can be gleaned from the more mundane task of trying to move commuters into and out of cities is that, if your goal is to move people, then the first thing you should do is take them out of their cars. A highway lane has a fixed capacity of about 2,000 vehicles per hour, independent of if those vehicles are carrying 1 person or 100 people.
Has anyone evacuated a city by rail (and bus?) in a reasonable time?
It wouldn't be necessary in Europe, since there aren't any expected disasters where evacuation is useful, but for comparison anyway, about 1.2 million people arrive in central London by metro or regional rail every morning.
So long as people don't mind where they end up — which is a huge and unworkable assumption — you could possibly evacuate central London by rail alone. Possibly. For a careful definition of "central".
Although the rail system has a very high capacity when everything works smoothly, it doesn't perform so well if there is disruption. Perhaps that is mitigated somewhat if you don't particularly care where the trains end up.
But the road network would probably work a lot better if there wasn't anyone trying to collect their children and spouse, then their elderly relative, before leaving.
Does evacuation by rail happen anywhere in Asia? Japan?
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But now I see we were only discussing evacuating 100,000 people. That's a routine event after a football match at a large stadium in Europe. Wembley Stadium in London can hold 105,000 for a rock concert (or 90,000 for football), and the vast majority of people leave by metro or regional train within about an hour of the end of the concert.
Again though, that's using a transport system suitable for a major capital city to evacuate a town's worth of people. A town alone wouldn't invest in this much capacity.
This is actually a well oiled machine at Twickenham, home of rugby, where the capacity crowd is nearer 80000.
There is just the one station and, come end of the match, there are no additional trains put on. People just use the regular commuter trains that are on the regular routes up to Waterloo station in central London. Even when there is a match you can get the train as a regular traveller although getting a seat is unlikely.
Only a modest amount of staff are needed at Twickenham station for crowd control. There is practically no parking at Twickenham so that crowd really does have to get the train or park far away from the stadium in a residential street.
It takes people a while to diffuse down to the station so there are packed trains for a good couple of hours.
The same trains also serve Ascot where the horses race. So you can have a train half full of people in rugby shirts and half filled with 'silly hats', as per the fashion at Ascot.
Not only that but the same trains can carry thousands of more people heading up to London for the Notting Hill Carnival (again no parking, drinking likely).
To further stretch the capacity of this small commuter line, you can also have another younger crowd on the same trains and at the same time heading to Reading, which is at the other end of the line, for a rock festival.
This can all happen with 'weekend engineering work' on the line, delays being merely typical for South West Trains, i.e. ten minutes late with the odd cancellation.
There can be delays due to drunken people deciding to press the alarms and opening the doors in between stations, or other such silly behaviour.
Despite all of this trains come through, people get to where they are going and everything is remarkably orderly. The mood on these trains is more like the atmosphere on a lift - you know, nobody talks, everyone behaves and there is no confrontation. It is really quite remarkable and efficient.
Come Monday morning and the commute to work, now that is when the trains on this small branch line get seriously packed. Being able to move your rib cage for the purposes of breathing is not so easy at 7.30 a.m. on those trains that did such an excellent job of getting everyone to the rugby over the weekend.
Evacuees need to carry their infants, pets, and enough luggage to live for a few days... there’s nowhere near crush-load commute capacity. There is no point to a little town in the woods if it’s going to be urban enough for transit coverage. It really looks like humans just shouldn’t live in places like this.
Towns obliterated by fires just don't happen often enough that we need to make forests "no-go" areas. Even if one town per year were completely destroyed it wouldn't be sufficient justification because there are many such towns and the probability of a specific one being destroyed is still a once in a century event.
Why are cities not planned such that evacuation routes are already commonly used routes in the morning peak? If you plan city that way, all roads will saturate equally instead of all traffic stuffing on highways and arterials, in non-evacuation scenarios.
EDIT: descendant merged
In normal use, the peak travel pattern is essentially a unidirectional peak into the city in the morning and the opposite direction in the afternoon. That usually calls for a load that can handle the peak unidirectional traffic with the other direction being fairly empty, as managing the reversibility of lanes is difficult. (That said, the highway near to me right now does have three lanes of HOV that reverse direction, although that is one of the longest stretches in the entire world of such reversibility that is regularly exercised).
However, there is an important difference between the regular commute and evacuation in terms of traffic patterns. In the regular commute, the flow generally extends only between the suburbs and the city core; in an evacuation, you generally need to go a much further distance, well beyond the furthest suburbs. As a result, you're looking at carrying evacuation routes on roads that are only meant to handle at worst summer vacation inter-city travel, so you see 12 lanes of traffic have to scrunch into 2 lanes of traffic.
This. People would rather have "rush hour" be from 3-8pm rather than pay for enough spare capacity that peak demand only saturates the system from 5-6.
If a four lane highway is saturated for 3hr you'd need twelve lanes to cut that time to 1hr. That's a lot of money.
They're completely different scenarios. Commuting is usually one-directional towards the center of the city and business areas with the working population.
Evacuation is outward to completely leave the city, and includes everyone and their luggage, while being squeezed through suburban areas to just a few interstate highways.
Yes, but planning to make sure commuting and evacuation patterns identical would make the city sufficiently distributed. You would obliterate the CBD problem which causes rushed congestion in roadways. You would just need to go further to evacuate such a city.
My instinct is to say buses, and don't wait too long. Let's do some math:
Edit: Corrected math. Thanks!
You can easily fit 20 people/bus. So that's 5,000 bus rides. 2000 busses/hour/lane is a reasonable estimate. They had a 4 lane road, 2 lanes in each direction, so 4000 buses per hour. Divide capacity by 2 to account for inefficiency and round up to get to 3 hours
That's a lot of busses, but not an unreasonable number.
To hit those numbers you have to be forcing people to evacuate by bus. If they try and take a car you need to stop them before they jam up the road. American's aren't going to take that easily. Of course you can encourage them to evacuate by car before you start the mandatory by bus evacuation. It's not like forest fires come with 0 warning.
1) Possibly the road could be rearranged to allow travel only in one direction, freeing up at least 1 extra lane?
2) It might be possible to get some of the bigger 50 or 80 capacity transit buses, or some large school buses? One article I found suggested California had in excess of 20,000 school buses, although I'm still looking for a reliable source to back that up.
1) Possible, but you've got significant traffic in both directions. You need to get bus's in as well as out.
2) Absolutely. And really you could probably stuff 80 people into your a bus in an emergency. But you're going to have a real problem organizing people onto buses so I worry that in reality you'd be running many well below peak capacity.
We don't have that many spare buses close enough to any city that would have to be evacuated. Paradise had only a few hours warning. That's just not enough time to gather resources from outside the immediate area.
Paradise in particular had shockingly little warning. It's hard to imagine coordinating any substantial response in time. Still, I'd like to think about what the best evacuation we could do in general even if we can manage to fix this case (The population was also on 25,000 instead of 100,000).
I'm not from California, I'm from Toronto, and to make life easy on myself I'm going to use Toronto numbers. Here the primary public transit operator has (as of 2010, I doubt it's changed that much) about 2000 buses. That's obviously not all of the buses in the city, there are school buses, private charter buses, etc. But it's probably over half.
If we can get the round trip time down to an hour, we can saturate this road. Obviously the response time (to when we start evacuating people) is no better than the travel distance from Toronto to a location we need to evacuate. If we had plans in place to react to these sorts of situations I imagine we could make in no more than an hour or two more than that.
(This also cripples Toronto's public transit, but that's probably acceptable in a emergency).
A round trip time of an hour, including loading and unloading, isn't going to get anyone out of range of a hurricane, fire, or serious flood. The trip times for buses would be several hours at a minimum.
I mean, I left lots of room in my estimate for a reason. But I think you might underestimate how fast you can go on a police controlled highway with only 1 exit and 1 small region of entrances.
You can easily fit 111 people per bus. That makes 901 bus rides. 1000 buses/hour is a reasonable estimate. You can evacuate the city in just one hour if you allow standees during evacuation.
Jams happen most often because people operate cars with incomplete information about the cars around them and inability to operate their cars optimally. As self driving cars advance and become networked the idea is that they could perform a lift like this while communicating with one another.
That said, this is a possibility but not a proper solution.
Public transit is perhaps also a possibility but not a solution.
The real solution though seems much less palatable. Only a few disasters require the mass evacuation of people and perhaps its simply better to keep our cities and populations from the edges of fire prone lands and draw back our cities and people from the immediate coastal paths of hurricanes.
Quickly? You don’t. It’s a function of people and time, short time, small number of people.
Think about your daily drive. If you aren’t the first car at every single stop light, you likely getting out if 100,000 other people want to as well.
I find it a tad frustrating that people don’t think about these things until they are happening, but life isn’t assured, your government might not always be coming to help, you are responsible for your own safety.
>I find it a tad frustrating that people don’t think about these things until they are happening, but life isn’t assured, your government might not always be coming to help, you are responsible for your own safety.
The second part of your sentence is the cause of the first. The idea that there exists a situation where one could be literally on your own with no authority figure to help you is an ideological non-starter to a lot of people. It's just wholly incompatible with everything they believe so any discussion about how to prepare for that possibility won't happen.
Absolutely. I was involved in volunteer emergency response for one of my past employers. I learned that for earthquake prep we kept a container full of cheap bicycles in the parking lot.
There are circumstances for which I'd suggest a bike is a reasonable mobility tool. Say, after a major earthquake, where immediate hazards are few, fuel supplies are limited, mobility options few, and when the ability to pick up the bike or wheel it through areas where the roadbed is badly damaged or littered with debris would be a strong plus for a bicycle.
Having done quite a bit of cycling myself (multiple century and double-century rides -- miles, periods of 200-300+ mile weeks regulary, a 30+ mile round-trip commute, extensive tours), personal experience with much of the regions burnt by recent wildfires (I'd visited a friend in Chico fall of 2015, and drove out via the next highway north of Paradise, CA-32 to Lassen), with its mountainous terrain and very close-in forests (I was struck by how dry the region was three years ago, and was concerned at the time of what I'd do if a fire were to start), and been relatively close to smaller (though still multi-acre) wildfires, and watched footage of the Paradise evacuation, I would not want to rely on a bike to get me away from one under the circumstances prevailing for Paradise.
The timeline of the fire, warnings, alerts, and evacuation were short. The fire was massive and intense. Flames were immediately adjacent to if not on the roadbed. One of the factors disabling vehicles were tires exploding from heat. And the primary road out (Skyway) is not a constant descent -- there are up-and-down sections.
Cycling through that would simply be insane.
Flat terrain, a constant descent, ample warning: possibly.
Conditions of Paradise in November 2018: not a chance in the hell that it was.
Which also tells you something...if there were as many cars in Pripyat, the situation would have been similar. In other words, the two emergency situations differ in most aspects.
But yeah, buses scale far better than individual cars, that's for sure.
(Oh, and btw, given the long-running tinfoil campaigns against federal agencies in general and emergency response in particular, I can totally see how "This is FEMA, everyone get onto our buses, we'll take you somewhere safe" would prompt an orderly evacuation. Not.)
Every source I've found says that the government delayed the evacuation by more than a day before sending in the buses. Once the buses had arrived, it took several hours to evacuate.
It's relatively easy to quickly move 100K people in a city of 10M. But it's impossible to quickly move 100K in a city of 100K. It's all about proportions. There's not enough transportation infrastructure anywhere to get 100% of the population out.
In the US, building of new roads has not kept up with population increases (in part because there's no place to put new roads). Even the smallest towns tend to have delays and grid lock at rush hour, and that's only part of the population. The speed of the fires also requires a greater evacuation speed. A bicycle would probably be faster than a car given the capacity of the roads.
I think the long term answer here is to either not rebuild or mandate that the houses be built to a wildfire proof standard. Stucco, tile, ember and flame proof soffits etc... and maybe fire shutters and doors.
"Built to Burn" is a great podcast episode from 99% Invisible that talked about wildfire prevention and mitigation techniques. It mainly comes down to proper home and surroundings design to prevent the spread of fire, letting it burn itself out.
These fires burn hot enough to melt any metal in the construction, consume all the oxygen and create an atmosphere equivalent to the surface of Venus. What you're proposing is essential a giant oven.
During the "Black Saturday" bush fires in Victoria in 2009 they estimated the temperature of the fires to be around 1200 degrees celsius (2190 F). My father-in-law is a volunteer in the rural fire service in Australia. He says some fires he's fought have been so hot they hurt your face to look at them for more than a few seconds, even when they are hundreds of meters away.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Saturday_bushfires
Except I live neara wildfire zone and there is a nearby college where their plan is to shelter in place, and this plan worked for a wildfire that burned down several buildings on the campus.
Though i was wrong about the no vegetation zone; it's 200 feet, not 20
I highly doubt that these fires create an atmosphere of ~90bar with wind speeds in excess of 300km/hr, and temperatures averaging about 450C. The surface of Venus is a type of brutal that we don't experience on Earth, luckily.
Technicalities like that get lost in the noise when the political poo flinging over who's gonna pay and where it'll be located starts. An idea can't just be correct. It needs to be correct and marketable to people who don't really care.
The problem is that "wildfire proof" means "cleared and maintained land of sufficient area around your house."
That means sufficient land area per house and more than annual maintenance of that land. Both of these are expensive so people will not do them in California.
Have you lived there? I heard that the town had done some sort of evacuation practice after a big fire in ...2008 I believe? How did the previous practice inform the evacuation this time?
Yes, I've lived in Paradise many years and was in town for the 2008 fire. I heard that since the 2008 fire the town debated making bigger roads but instead decided on breaking the town into zones and evacuating by zone. This fire was very unusual in that within a couple of hours it seemed to have spread to many location across town. At my location by 745am (the fire begin 10 miles from town at 630am) there were many bits of burnt bark and leaves raining down all around. Many of these were likely falling in different locations as embers. The town is in an area of frequent fires, it's not uncommon to have nearby fires, they generally move in the order of a day so a zoned evacuation in many normal cases could work. I've never seen a fire that moved this quickly.
Paradise is small mountain retirement town situated between two canyons. Very wooded, most roads aren't wide and don't have sidewalks, mostly wooden houses and mobile homes. Essentially a forest full of homes. From what I can tell from personal and firsthand accounts the fire was burning in places all across town within 3 hours. The whole town of 27,000+ people needed to leave at once, a very challenging situation.
That morning I had gotten up somewhat early to do some work, around 745 the light outside was redder than it should be. Going outside I found smoke high in the air and large bits of burnt material falling. An online fire map showed a small fire had started 10 miles north east of town. The weather map showed a 17mph wind headed south west. Out of caution we started packing a few things just in case we get an evacuation notice. However, after 30 minutes or so listening to an online emergency radio scanner and searching social media it became clear we needed to leave. Within an hour we had our 4runner packed and around 9am we were heading out, the sky had now turned dark like night and we encountered normal traffic. We stopped at our office to grab a flat of water, while there got a robocall (landline) notification to evacuate. We headed out of town and just a mile down the road (south middle of town) we saw a large patch of fire burning a few hundred feet from the road. Paradise has essentially 3 roads out, two of them are two lane roads. Often when there's a fire at least one or two can be blocked by fire.
We evacuated by car, one car, we could have taken two but decided to stick together in one. Five of us.
Interesting. When New Orleans or Texas flooded we heard about how we shouldn’t build in places prone to natural disasters. Much less of that talk here about building in the forest.
I would think survivable shelters should not be too hard to build if you also place oxygen tanks with breathing masks there as well. After all some properties already have swimming pools, which together with breathing masks should do the trick.
shelters might do well in brushfires. Not sure how they do when huge trees are on fire.
Long term solution: don't build there. Even evacuations don't work: nah, my house is too far...I'll leave in a bit...let me just get a few more things etc etc.
I imagine underground shelters would be workable. Heat tends to rise, and ground seems like a good insulator. You would still probably need to get rid of most air circulation with the outside, and come up with some plan for safely exiting.
Indeed. I get that those forest developments are beautiful. But living in mediterranean-type climate areas is foolish. The more effectively you suppress fire, the worse it will be, when it happens.
I know people on Hacker News have no love for multi-level concrete parking garages, but it seems to me that such structures could easily be engineered to withstand the effects of a fire like this one. This way residents could shelter in place, or at least shelter "nearby", in the event of similar massive, fast-moving fires.
If you built structures like this in most every neighborhood, well, I guess they'd be big eyesores, but then, on the other hand, you could get rid of a bunch of on street parking.
if you think a giant concrete parking structure would (a) work to shelter in place in the face of a giant, wind-powered fire or (b) be appropriate in a northern California locale like paradise you are more out of touch than the president telling us we need to "rake the forest floor". I don't want to come down too hard on someone proposing an idea in good faith, but you need to dramatically re-align your perspective to truly understand the scale and scope of this problem.
We can't use simple buildings to mitigate this; it's not a minor change to forest practices. It is a fundamental convergence of decades-old policies, millions of people living in the forest interface and global climatic changes.
> ... you are more out of touch than the president telling us we need to "rake the forest floor". I don't want to come down too hard on someone proposing an idea in good faith, ...
I think this is a terrible response. If you want to disagree with me I think you can do it without being a jerk.
As to the US, no-one has ever died in traffic save for one single example I found in one canyon fire in California where a police cruiser assisting with evacuations crashed into a tree and blocked the road [You should expect once one person crashes, the next person will crash into them due to poor visibility] and the other end of the road was blocked by the fire and I think some roadworks, I'd need to look it up. That aside evacuation is much safer than "stay in place" particularly as the latter requires a great deal of mental fortitude to remain focussed in dense smoke and loud noise [people fail to do simple things and die], little own having a structure that will provide survivable conditions.
Roads can move a huge number of people even in cars. The only exception to this is to my understanding, again in California where there is a valley with a freeway through it but too many residences and I think limited capacity getting on to the freeway to evacuate everyone quickly.
Takeaway - evacuate early, nobody ever died from evacuating needlessly. Remember its just "stuff", possessions are not worth risking your life.