As wildfires bore down on neighborhoods across Los Angeles this week, residents and authorities faced a wrenching and almost 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’ worth of research into wildfire evacuations. The field is small but growing, reflecting recent studies that suggest 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.
“Definitely the interest [in evacuation research] has increased due to the frequency of wildfire burns,” says Asad Ali, an engineering doctoral student at the North Dakota State University whose work has focused on the field. “We’re seeing more publications, more articles.”
When evacuations go…
