Inequity in U.S. wildfire emergency response
WASHINGTON, DC, 2023 – Recent U.S. wildfire events -- including the 2023 Maui wildfire in Hawaii, the 2022 Hermit’s Peak/Calf Canyon fire in New Mexico, and the 2020 Cameron Peak Fire in Colorado -- are tragic examples of how disadvantaged communities can suffer most during and after a wildfire. While all three fires had a devastating impact on an entire community, they disproportionately affected low-income populations who were left without adequate insurance or the financial means to rebuild their homes.
To study inequities in U.S. wildfire management, scientists at the State University of New York at Buffalo are conducting a data-driven assessment of how socioeconomic variables affect the allocation of resources during a wildfire incident. Specifically, they are investigating how socioeconomic variables (such as income and racial demographics) impact the number of personnel dispatched to a community post-wildfire and the dollars spent on extinguishing the fire.
They will present their preliminary results at the 2023 Society for Risk Analysis Annual Conference in Washington, D.C.
In their ongoing study, Industrial and Systems Engineering professor Sayanti Mukherjee and M.S. student Fatima Umar have collected data from the U.S. Census Bureau on county-level socioeconomic indicators like average income and racial demographic composition and obtained detailed information on more than 230,000 wildfire events nationwide from 2014 to 2022 (provided by the National Interagency Fire Center).
“Our results show a pronounced trend in which counties with higher percentages of lower-income and black populations receive less personnel and funding,” says Mukherjee. “Conversely, counties with higher proportions of high-income and white people are more likely to secure significant amounts of these resources.”
The researchers have also observed that the percentage of households with annual income over $200,000 positively correlates with the number of personnel and the estimated cost of putting out a fire. “This indicates that high-income neighborhoods receive more attention in the wildfire disaster response and recovery phase,” says Umar.
Based on their preliminary findings, Mukherjee and Umar suggest that equity-informed risk analysis should be incorporated into disaster response planning to provide a more accurate assessment of the wildfire-induced risk in a community. “This would enable government officials to work towards reducing disparities in wildfire management and response,” says Mukherjee. “By considering marginalized communities’ unique needs and vulnerabilities, disaster response efforts can be more equitable and just.”
Their research is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF)’s Strengthening American Infrastructure (SAI) program (NSF Award # 2324616).
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Presentations are at the Westin Washington DC.
Data-Driven Analysis of Equity in Wildfire Resource Allocation – Wednesday, December 13, 9:10-9:30 a.m.
About SRA
The Society for Risk Analysis is a multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, scholarly, international society that provides an open forum for all those interested in risk analysis. SRA was established in 1980. Since 1982, it has continuously published Risk Analysis: An International Journal, the leading scholarly journal in the field. For more information, visit www.sra.org.
JOURNAL
Risk Analysis
Helping more people get to safety in a wildfire
Scientists have developed a web-based tool to help communities design an optimal wildfire evacuation plan
Reports and ProceedingsWASHINGTON, DC, Dec. 13, 2023 – Wildfires pose an increasing threat to communities at the wildland-urban interface (WUI) – where dry, flammable vegetation borders back yards, often in remote locations. Despite the well-known danger, many communities at highest risk do not have a strong wildfire evacuation plan in place. (One of these was the town of Lahaina on Maui, where wind-driven wildfires killed nearly 100 people in August 2023.)
Researchers from UCLA’s John Garrick Institute for the Risk Sciences have built a new web-based software platform that allows emergency planners to design custom-made evacuation plans for their communities that will help more people safely escape an oncoming wildfire. The results of a first test of the tool, using the deadly 2018 Camp Fire in California as an example, will be presented by Mohammad Pishahang at the annual meeting of the Society for Risk Analysis (SRA), Dec. 11-13 in Washington, D.C.
The Wildfire Safe Egress planning (WISE) simulation platform is a visual, Geographic Information Systems (GIS) environment that allows users to simulate several wildfire scenarios on a map and calculate the likelihood of the safe evacuation of a population. It incorporates data on the demographics and road network of a community and allows users to input specific factors such as fire dynamics, community boundaries, warning system parameters, and shelter locations. It is the first wildfire evacuation planning tool to also include several factors affecting human behavior in emergency situations such as age, income level, English proficiency, disabilities, and vehicle ownership (all of which impact a household’s decision to evacuate).
The Deadly Camp Fire of 2018
To demonstrate WiSE and its capabilities, Pishahang and his colleagues recently simulated an evacuation of the entire city of Paradise during California’s deadliest wildfire: the Camp Fire of 2018, which killed 85 people.
For the simulation, they set the “awareness trigger time” (one of the data inputs) to just one hour before the fire entered the city, and they assumed that the warning system completely failed. “This is consistent with the real-life events in which the official evacuation warnings failed to reach the population successfully,” says Pishahang.
In this simulation, the researchers found that only 16 percent of the at-risk community population had the opportunity to safely exit the danger zone. Consequently, 84 percent of the population evacuated while already facing the fire and being surrounded by it (not considered to be a safe evacuation). These results were qualitatively validated by the firefighters who served in the Camp Fire disaster.
When they shortened the pre-evacuation time (i.e. indicating faster decision-making and action by the at-risk people) and accounted for a better (working) warning system in a second simulation, they discovered that:
if the community had 2 hours to exit the area in the same situation, more than 40 percent of the population could have left the danger zone before the fire reached the borders of the city; and
if only 20 percent of the at-risk people had been made aware of the need to evacuate by an official warning system one hour before the fire reached the city borders, still more than 44 percent of the residents would have had the opportunity to safely exit the danger zone.
“These findings demonstrate how WiSE can help emergency managers design the best possible evacuation plan and indicate the best evacuation preparation strategies for their community that are based on data and maximize the number of people who can safely escape an oncoming wildfire,” says Pishahang.
For each wildfire scenario, the program identifies main bottlenecks and traffic congestion points so planners can address these issues before a natural disaster occurs.
“Many existing WUI communities do not sufficiently meet evacuation-related travel needs, including suburbs built with only one road in and out,” says Pishahang. “WiSE can help planners see how to decrease a community’s vulnerability by increasing roads traffic capacity in addition to improving the reliability of communication and warning systems and educating residents on how to follow evacuation orders in event of an emergency.”
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Presentations are located at The Westin Washington, D.C.
WiSE: Wildfire Safe Evacuation Planning and Management – Wednesday, December 13, 8:30-8:50 a.m.
About SRA
The Society for Risk Analysis is a multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, scholarly, international society that provides an open forum for all those interested in risk analysis. SRA was established in 1980. Since 1982, it has continuously published Risk Analysis: An International Journal, the leading scholarly journal in the field. For more information, visit www.sra.org.
JOURNAL
Risk Analysis
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