
Forced Out by Deadly Fires, Then Trapped in Traffic - wglb
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/11/us/california-fire-paradise.html
======
softgrow
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.

~~~
davidgay
> 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

[http://articles.latimes.com/1991-10-23/news/mn-174_1_fire-
vi...](http://articles.latimes.com/1991-10-23/news/mn-174_1_fire-victims)

~~~
softgrow
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.

~~~
King-Aaron
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.

[https://www.cfa.vic.gov.au/plan-prepare/radiant-
heat](https://www.cfa.vic.gov.au/plan-prepare/radiant-heat)

(Sauce: I've been involved with volunteer bush firefighters)

~~~
dwd
I had an uncle who got trapped on Mount Macedon in '83 where he spent the
night on the floor of a concrete public toilet block.

His car while drivable had the CFA logo magnet welded to the door from the
heat of the firestorm.

~~~
King-Aaron
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!

~~~
dwd
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.

------
PuffinBlue
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.

[https://www.youtube.com/user/blancolirio](https://www.youtube.com/user/blancolirio)

~~~
zawerf
There was a firsthand video where a guy came back after the fire was over to
find his neighbors as a bunch of skeletons inside their burnt cars.

"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."

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rmu2-P18Is](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rmu2-P18Is)

~~~
danso
I'd wager that most of the people who managed to die in this fire were doing
things that seem inexplicably superficial in their final moments.

~~~
aaron695
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.

~~~
manigandham
When there is a fire alarm, the only 100% correct thing to do is evacuate the
area immediately.

~~~
perl4ever
But this is in some sense a failure to learn from experience. Every experience
of a fire alarm is non-fatal except the last one.

------
wglb
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.

~~~
gpm
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.

~~~
chrisseaton
Where on earth do these busses come from? Do you propose we should be ready to
produce an army of busses anywhere in the US at a moment's notice?

~~~
closeparen
Anywhere with a reasonably anticipated need to evacuate, yeah.

~~~
Piskvorrr
In other words, this falls flat as "reasonably anticipated" gets shot down by
cost.

~~~
closeparen
Human life is generally worth more than the corresponding proportion of a bus.

~~~
Piskvorrr
Correct. This is, however, a sentiment which is only expressed during a
catastrophe. Give it a few weeks, and see the bean-counters deny this again.

------
sjg007
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.

~~~
manigandham
"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.

[https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/built-to-
burn/](https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/built-to-burn/)

~~~
masonic
Look at aerial views of the Paradise fire area -- trees survived almost
everywhere where buildings burned to the ground.

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psynch
I was in Paradise the morning of the fire. Does anyone have any questions?

~~~
Diederich
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?

~~~
psynch
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.

~~~
Diederich
Thanks for your assessment.

> I've never seen a fire that moved this quickly.

I've been hearing a lot of this of late.

------
scarejunba
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.

------
ummonk
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.

~~~
onetimemanytime
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.

~~~
gizmo686
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.

------
axilmar
Same thing happened in Greece recently...The roads were so narrow that people
were burned alive...

------
curtis
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.

~~~
ui-explorer12
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.

~~~
curtis
> _... 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.

