Forced Out by Deadly Fires, Then Trapped in Traffic
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
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.
http://articles.latimes.com/1991-10-23/news/mn-174_1_fire-vi...
https://www.cfa.vic.gov.au/plan-prepare/radiant-heat
(Sauce: I've been involved with volunteer bush firefighters)
His car while drivable had the CFA logo magnet welded to the door from the heat of the firestorm.
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.
And, for more detail: https://localwiki.org/oakland/Oakland_Firestorm_1991 - "Over half of the fatalities were in automobiles that were burned up on the winding roads."
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...
"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."
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 went to their house right here in this white car to get them out.
She had to put her makeup on.
She died because of it."
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
No one wants to pay for that level of capacity.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Or elderly, disabled, infants, children, pets, ...
Well, they can stay in cars, but if even a small percentage of able-bodied adults got on a bike instead, then that's your problem solved.
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.
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.
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.
I thought those numbers seemed high.
Two thoughts:
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.
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.
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).
There should basically already be an army of buses in every big city.
If it isn't being done then it's because it hasn't been planned and/or paid for, not because it's a scale we can't deal with.
Though i was wrong about the no vegetation zone; it's 200 feet, not 20
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.
> I've never seen a fire that moved this quickly.
I've been hearing a lot of this of late.
did you take one car by yourself or share a ride with others?
We evacuated by car, one car, we could have taken two but decided to stick together in one. Five of us.
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.
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.
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.
I think this is a terrible response. If you want to disagree with me I think you can do it without being a jerk.