Living with fire and evacuations in a pandemic

The Fire Adapted Communities Learning Network recently facilitated two productive learning opportunities on wildfire evacuation planning. If you missed these discussions, you can catch them here (Part 1: Practitioner perspectives) and here (Part 2: Research perspectives).

For Part 2 of the learning series, I was invited to share key findings and recommendations from our NSF-supported Working Group’s research on Wildfire Preparedness and Evacuation Planning in a Pandemic.

By way of background, our Working Group’s research objective was to understand how communities prepare for and recover from wildfires during a deadly pandemic.

This topic was of interest to us because communities are increasingly experiencing compound hazards and cascading disaster impacts, which can have a direct influence on how people practice safety and make decisions around preparedness, evacuation, sheltering, and returns.

So, in April 2020, we set out to understand how institutions and communities in two locations — Nevada County in California and Larimer County in Colorado coped with the wildfire-pandemic interface.

In my 8-minute presentation today, I focused on three high-level findings and corresponding recommendations from this research.

FINDINGS

1.Well-functioning partnerships and prior relationships enable local agencies and community networks to pivot, be responsive, and agile, even in the face of great complexity.

Early in 2020, local agencies across both case study locations pivoted to conducting virtual planning exercises remotely, often with smaller teams meeting in-person.

We found that strong local leadership and clear timely communication between local agencies played an important role in achieving a coordinated response for both the pandemic and the wildfires later in the year.

On the community side, although evacuation drills had been planned for both locations in 2020, these had to be cancelled due to the lockdowns.

Yet, Firewise communities made up for the lack of in-person activities by hosting virtual Town Halls and creating regular opportunities for virtual discussion around household preparedness including defensible space, evacuation planning, and public safety power shutoffs.

All of these virtual discussions, that built on prior relationships and partnerships, really did make a difference in how neighborhoods prepared to evacuate at the time of the fires.

We found that being a part of such collective work made it easier to plan for contingencies even amidst all the complexity.

Yet, the flip side of this new reliance on virtual modes of communication that built on prior partnerships was that people who were not already part of these partnerships, got left out altogether.

2. Experiences of social isolation, anxiety, and trauma from cascading disasters can affect personal preparedness and evacuation decisions.

We heard many narratives of people being ‘tired’, ‘scared’, ‘depressed’, ‘panicked’, like they ‘were in a bad dream’.

For some demographics, there was a general absence of personal connections and meaningful social interactions.

This was especially the case among older adults and people with disabilities, living in remote rural communities, in mobile homes and encampments, and this certainly affected how and if people could get help, especially during evacuations.

Too often, people just didn’t have someone to count on.

By way of example, a community disability advocate who conducts disaster preparedness outreach work with people with disabilities in Nevada County shared that their organization had adopted messaging around ‘find your five’ people who can support you during a disaster, but what they found during meetings with clients was that a lot of people just don’t have five people in their lives.

This is where the work of community advocates really came in, to support people with little or no access to care networks.

3. Neighbors, community groups, and voluntary networks are heroes too!

There are so many great examples of how community groups stepped up and plugged gaps at a time when institutional capacities were stretched.

For example, in Colorado, the North 40 Mountain Alliance started a food pantry to help a remote mountain community get access to food at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns.

People had lost their jobs, there was unemployment, food insecurity, and housing instability.

In parallel, to make up for the lack of wildfire preparedness outreach and community evacuation drills due to all the COVID constraints, the Mountain Alliance started to hand out flyers and information about wildfire preparedness and evacuation planning.

This made the food pantry the community’s new disaster information hub — which then also had a major role in helping people evacuate and recover from the multiple fires.

We found that the most positive outcomes were evident in communities that had active volunteer networks and community-led actions

RECOMMENDATIONS

I concluded by highlighting three recommendations as we all work our way through this evolving wildfire-pandemic interface.

1. Continue to create and maintain strong local partnerships that are informed by a holistic assessment of the social, ecological, and public health impacts of wildfires. COVID-19 has reinforced what we have long known — which is that no one institution operating in any one silo can do this alone. We need a more convergent approach to address these compounding disasters — and this will require us to think about evacuations as a social, ecological, and public health issue.
2. Develop a more robust intersectional analysis of how diverse populations practice safety. Too often, we’re telling people what to do, we’re handing out checklists of do’s and don’ts but we’re not listening to people’s experiences, and asking them about their preferences, about how they practice and experience safety. So, we recommend co-learning with people from diverse backgrounds, and creating opportunities to engage with diverse community perspectives on an ongoing basis.
3. Invest in community infrastructure and bolster local capabilities to mitigate and adapt to compounding disaster risk. Evacuation planning can only be successful in a resilient ecosystem that includes robust community transportation and infrastructure, well-maintained institutional capabilities, and whole of society networks of care. As we’ve witnessed in the past 18 months, no one is safe until everyone is safe.

See our complete research report here and a previous blog summarizing the report here.

Please feel free to send in comments and questions – we look forward to learning from your experiences with evacuation planning in a pandemic!