Evaluating rural Pacific Northwest towns for wildfire evacuation vulnerability

Dye, Alex; Kim, John B.; McEvoy, Andy; Fang, Fang; Riley, Karin L.

doi:10.1007/s11069-021-04615-x

Cited by 19 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 45 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…When large, wind‐driven fires do occur, westside communities would be well served by investments in public awareness and evacuation planning based on existing risk information (Cova et al, 2011; Dye et al, 2021; McCaffrey et al, 2018; Whittaker et al, 2020). While a red flag warning of the possibility of large wildfire was known days in advance of the 2020 events (Mass et al, 2021), the novelty and implications of such a warning were lost across much of the westside region.…”

Section: The Setting: Fire Regimes and Land‐use Legacies Of The Westsidementioning

confidence: 99%

Cascadia Burning: The historic, but not historically unprecedented, 2020 wildfires in the Pacific Northwest,USA

et al. 2022

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Wildfires devastated communities in Oregon and Washington in September 2020, burning almost as much forest west of the Cascade Mountain crest ("the westside") in 2 weeks (~340,000 ha) as in the previous five decades (~406,00 ha). Unlike dry forests of the interior western United States, temperate rain forests of the Pacific Northwest have experienced limited recent fire activity, and debates surrounding what drove the 2020 fires, and management strategies to adapt to similar future events, necessitate a scientific evaluation of the fires. We evaluate five questions regarding the 2020 Labor Day fires:(1) How do the 2020 fires compare with historical fires? (2) How did the roles of weather and antecedent climate differ geographically and from the recent past (1979-2019)? (3) How do fire size and severity compare to other recent fires , and how did forest management and prefire forest structure

show abstract

Section: The Setting: Fire Regimes and Land‐use Legacies Of The Westsidementioning

confidence: 99%

Cascadia Burning: The historic, but not historically unprecedented, 2020 wildfires in the Pacific Northwest,USA

et al. 2022

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…One of the main challenges in evacuating remote communities in Canada is evacuation by air (McGee, 2021). In fire‐prone regions of the United States, Australia, and Mediterranean Europe, most communities can access the road network (Dye et al, 2021; Pastor et al, 2020; Taylor & Freeman, 2010), but the only road access for many remote communities of northern Canada is through extensive peatlands where the roads can be used only when the ground is frozen in the winter (Hori et al, 2018). These “fly‐in” communities face unique challenges for evacuation, including the cost and availability of aircraft, coordinating with the Department of National Defense to provide those aircraft, and constraints on the sizes of aircraft that could land due to runway length and surface characteristics (Widener et al, 2017).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Despite the unique attributes of each wildfire and each community that is potentially exposed, it may be possible to classify at‐risk communities into groups with distinctive risk factors. If such groups are defined based on their local fire regime, the surrounding vegetation or fuels, and the community's evacuation capacity (e.g., access to the road network; Dye et al, 2021), they could be useful in guiding plans to mitigate future risk. Because many of these risk factors and evacuation challenges are likely to be correlated, identifying groups of communities that share a similar risk environment could help identify the key wildfire evacuation “syndromes” that are repeated across the forested regions (Archibald et al, 2013; Schellnhuber et al, 1997).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Wildfire evacuation patterns and syndromes across Canada's forested regions

et al. 2022

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Human exposure to wildfire is increasing in many regions globally—a trend likely to continue as climate change drives increases in wildfire activity and human populations continue to expand into fire‐prone landscapes. In Canada, this trend is reflected by a steady increase in the annual number of wildfire evacuations since the 1980s. Evacuations can be costly and cause severe stress, even when homes remain undamaged. Because many factors driving community vulnerability are likely correlated, classifying at‐risk communities into groups whose members share common drivers of wildfire vulnerability will be helpful in identifying the key wildfire evacuation “syndromes” that are repeated in different parts of the landscape. Understanding these syndromes will aid in anticipating and mitigating the effects of future fire exposure. Here, we classify the populated places across Canada's forested regions into 19 groups using variables describing their potential vulnerability to wildfire, including the surrounding land cover, land use and infrastructure, and the local fire regime. Then, we evaluate the utility of these groups by comparing actual wildfire exposure among the groups using a unique dataset of 1043 wildfire evacuations from 1980 to 2019. We identified three main evacuation syndromes that represent 79% of all evacuations and are distinct in their geographic distribution, the characteristics of the fires that drove the evacuations, the communities exposed, and the likely mode of evacuation. In remote areas dominated by conifer forest, evacuations were driven primarily by lightning‐ignited fires in the summer. Exposed communities typically lacked access to the road network, making it important to plan for evacuation by air. In less remote mixedwood forest areas, evacuations were driven largely by human‐ignited fires in the spring, and most communities had access to major roads. In interior British Columbia, evacuations were mainly in the summer and driven by both lightning‐ and human‐ignited fires. These areas experienced the greatest increase in evacuation frequency over the last two decades, reflecting the local trend of increasing wildfire activity. These differences highlight how the major risk factors vary spatially across the forested regions and temporally over the fire season—knowledge that will facilitate more effective planning for future fire seasons.

show abstract

“…or identifying evacuation vulnerabilities associated with the transportation network (e.g., Dye et al 2021). To explore the interaction between biophysical wildfire directional vulnerability and evacuation vulnerability, our wildfire directional assessments were used as an input to transportation network analysis to identify transportation vulnerabilities for strategic evacuation planning in a recent study (i.e.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For each community selected for analysis, we defined a study area consisting of a 15 kilometer (km) circular buffer around the community centroid. Community centroids were used in lieu of irregular administrative boundaries to standardize the area under consideration and facilitate a systematic analysis of hundreds of communities across the entire province, which is consistent with other coarse scale studies of community-wildfire interactions (e.g., Dye et al 2021).…”

Section: Study Areamentioning

confidence: 99%

Assessing directional vulnerability to wildfire

Beverly

Forbes

2022

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Wildfires spread along trajectories set by a coincident wind direction. Despite the highly directional nature of wildfire threats to public safety, landscape fire risk assessments are typically omnidirectional. We used a simple, readily-available metric of landscape fire exposure to develop a systematic, standardized, descriptive assessment of directional vulnerability to wildfire at a point location. First, we defined a viable wildfire trajectory by analyzing 573 sample trajectories delineated within the burned areas of historical fires in the province of Alberta, Canada. On average, sample trajectories intersected locations assessed as having high wildfire exposure for 79% of their length. We therefore defined a viable fire trajectory as one with less than 1/5th of its length traversing low exposure. Using this criterion, we assessed the viability of directional trajectories around 913 small- to moderately-sized communities in the province. At each assessment point (i.e., community centroid), we delineated 360 possible wildfire trajectories into the community at 1° directional intervals. Each 15 km directional trajectory was divided into three equal-length segments for analysis, spanning: 0 (centroid) to 5 km; 5 km to 10 km; and 10 km to 15 km. The length of each directional trajectory segment that intersected high exposure was computed for all 1080 directional segments in each community study area. In total, we evaluated 986,040 directional segments. Communities exhibited highly unique and varied patterns of directional vulnerabilities to wildfire encroachment. Of the 913 communities analyzed, 136 had at least one continuous viable trajectory spanning the full 0-15 km distance from the community centroid and 211 communities had at least one continuous viable trajectory spanning 5 – 15 km from the community centroid. We developed a novel radial graph for displaying spatially referenced directional vulnerabilities to wildfire for a given community and combined results for all 913 analyzed communities to assess regional vulnerabilities within administrative management areas (i.e., Forest Areas). Potential applications of our directional wildfire assessment method are discussed, including prioritization of limited fire suppression resources, planning fuel reduction treatments, proactively identifying candidate locations for operational activities, and assessing evacuation vulnerabilities.

show abstract

Evaluating rural Pacific Northwest towns for wildfire evacuation vulnerability

Cited by 19 publications

References 45 publications

Cascadia Burning: The historic, but not historically unprecedented, 2020 wildfires in the Pacific Northwest,USA

Cascadia Burning: The historic, but not historically unprecedented, 2020 wildfires in the Pacific Northwest,USA

Wildfire evacuation patterns and syndromes across Canada's forested regions

Assessing directional vulnerability to wildfire

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About