Opinion:
I’ve been on the frontline of disasters. We must get better at evacuating
people
Opinion by Robert Lewin
Published 6:37 PM EDT, Mon July 1, 2024
Editor’s Note: Robert Lewin is the
former chief California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CAL
FIRE)/San Luis Obispo County Fire, capping off a 38-year fire service career,
and former director of the Santa Barbara County Office of Emergency
Management. He is principal at Resolute Associates, an emergency management
consulting firm. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own.
Read more opinion at CNN.
CNN —
In
2003, we were already days into an overwhelming Southern California fire siege when I was reassigned
to the Grand Prix fire ripping through San Bernadino and
Los Angeles counties. I was immediately deployed to direct the night
operations on the branch where the wildfire was running west at a “critical” rate of spread under the hot and
ferocious Santa Ana wind.
As my L.A. County Fire
partner and I were trying to get ahead of the flames, we drove up a narrow
road into a canyon neighborhood above the endless sea of homes in the flat
valley below. Appropriately called Live Oak Canyon, the neighborhood was
tight with homes surrounded by native brush and oak trees — now threatened by
fire in the hills above.
When the residents went to
bed that night, the fire was miles away and no threat. But now it was here,
and they were struggling to understand their situation as they stood in the
street in their night clothes gazing at the mesmerizing fire.
Along with a few police officers, my partner
and I told the residents they must evacuate now. But the small road out of
the canyon rapidly became backed up with cars — a potentially deadly
traffic jam. We got out to the intersection with a four-lane thoroughfare
only to find that the evacuees were stopped by oncoming drivers who were
unaware of the disaster unfolding in the canyon above. I saw a police officer
nearby, ran out to him and clearly requested that he stop all traffic until
the people evacuating the canyon could get out. Until that moment, he just
didn’t know the extent of the emergency. When eliminating an
emergency threat is not possible, protecting people is limited to only a few
possible actions: You can alert people to shelter-in-place, evacuate a
building, evacuate a neighborhood or evacuate a community. Evacuation of
people and animals is always complex — and often fails for a few and sometimes
for many.
It also can vary from
county to county since disaster response and recovery in the United States
primarily rests with local governments. As well intentioned as they are,
these localities may not have the resources or the experience that a disaster
requires — especially when they need to evacuate people.
But what happens when people can’t — or won’t — get out of harm’s
way?
There
are two types of disasters: one that you know is coming at you and one that
suddenly happens. An approaching storm, a tsunami or a wildfire usually gives
responders some time to alert and attempt to evacuate a community. An
earthquake, an explosion or a levee break may give you no time. In both
cases, disasters require quick decisions and fast action by authorities in
real time to prevent or limit injuries and deaths.
An immediate threat makes the decision to order evacuations
clear. When a fire, chemical leak or active-shooter emergency is occurring,
people obviously must leave and they understand the threat. But more often,
the decision of whether to evacuate is nuanced.
Is
the storm or hurricane growing in strength? Where will it strike? Is that
area prone to flooding? And how much time do we have?
The
wildfire is a ridge away from the community. Are the winds and temperatures
increasing? How long would it take for everyone to leave? Do we have that
kind of time? Do we evacuate the entire neighborhood or just the first few
streets next to the wildland?
Worse than being at home during a flood or wildfire is being
on a road impacted by those threats where there is no protection.
Should we have issued a shelter-in-place order instead of evacuation? People
in institutions such as hospitals, care facilities, schools and certain
hazardous industrial facilities may be better off sheltering in place
depending how hardened the facility is from the threat and whether time will
allow for a complicated evacuation. Protecting it may be a better option.
First
responders have two options when responding to an emergency. They can go on
the offense and stop the threat where it is, or they can go on defense,
focusing their efforts on protecting people and property. Firefighters, for
example, can go offensive and extinguish the wildfire to prevent its spread
to the community. When the fire intensity is too great or the terrain too
difficult to take this strategy, it forces them to back off, evacuate the
community and focus protection on key points of a threatened neighborhood.
Some
communities in these types of scenarios have tried to prepare
for a future emergency that may require evacuation by developing
procedures, purchasing alerting systems, providing dedicated emergency
management staff and conducting continuous training of responsible agencies.
They realize authorities cannot issue an emergency alert if they do not have
the equipment, the staff to operate it and the procedures and training for
that staff on how to do it.
Stacy Willett, a University of Akron professor in the Department
of Disaster Science and Emergency Services, studied evacuations after
Hurricane Katrina and singled out six major reasons why people ignore the
warning to flee:
Evacuations must meet the true needs of the
entire affected community. In addition to supporting the needs of people with access and functional needs, including seniors and people with
disabilities, warnings and other critical information should be broadcast
simultaneously in all the primary languages that are spoken in a community. Emergency managers need to truly partner with Red Cross and other
relief organizations to ensure all people who need emergency shelter are
provided equal
access, physical access and access to effective communication. Evacuation
preparedness must always consider the needs of people’s pets and livestock.
People will hesitate
or not evacuate at all if they are not confident their pets will be
taken care of.
Older
adults are more
likely to die from a disaster. The average
age of victims who died in the 2018 Camp Fire in Paradise,
California, was 72. Many adults can’t
easily evacuate – some because they don’t drive, others because they
are physically unable. And some people simply refuse to evacuate. Capable
neighbors must commit to helping their elderly neighbors safely evacuate
during an emergency.
Ultimately it is the individual and
family, not the authorities urging them to leave, who make
the decision to evacuate or not. Even within families there may be conflict
with one person wanting to leave and the other arguing that they should stay
and protect their home. After the deadly Montecito, California, debris flow — a
mudslide that killed 23 people on January 9, 2018 — we kept hearing stories
of families who debated whether they should follow the evacuation
order that was issued 24 hours before the disaster. In some cases, families
would split up and some members would stay behind.
Some people will have evacuation fatigue — they have been
evacuated multiple times before and nothing happened, they reason. An already
skeptical population will often find the validation they seek to
make their argument to stay or go. Government officials who say people in the
path of disaster must leave now may
not hold as much influence as the neighbor down the street who is
choosing to stay.
Communities must learn from each other’s
experiences with disaster evacuations. Unfortunately, we do not seem to do
this very well. It is as if we all must touch the hot stove to learn it is
hot.
How
many news conferences do we have to hear authorities say “we have never seen
anything like this before” — when only a county or two away they had a
similar experience just a few years earlier? Lake
County, California, in 2015; Sonoma
County, California, in 2017; the Town
of Paradise, California, in 2018; northwest
Oregon in 2020; and Maui
County, Hawaii, in 2023 are just a few examples of deadly disasters where
the public criticized authorities for similar evacuation failures.
All
too often we see these same failures repeat despite countless disaster
after-action reports detailing recommended improvements. Local governments in
the United States, with the assistance of state and federal governments,
should be able to learn from each other’s experiences, create effective
evacuation processes and ensure that the authorities who must implement them
are ready.
Making the danger clear When faced with an emergency, authorities in all communities must
be able to identify when to evacuate, where to evacuate from and where to
evacuate to, and be able to successfully alert and notify the community of
the evacuation. Procedures must be in place and training exercises should
occur regularly.
When people are better informed, they have the tools to make
better decisions about evacuating. When the government puts out information,
the public expects it to be accurate. But information released during an
emergency also must be fast, often at the expense of full verification and
accuracy. Threading this needle is essential. Using terminology that is
standardized and intuitively understood will help. And yet that too can be a
challenge.
For example, look at weather forecasting: Most
disasters are weather-related, and all disasters are impacted by
weather. The National Weather Service (NWS) is a national treasure as NWS
scientists throughout the country use an amazing array of technology and vast
experience to provide us with life-saving predictions. Even so, NWS
terminology can be confusing.
To
deliver critical weather threats, the NWS created standardized
terminology for weather-related emergencies: “watch,” “warning” and
“advisory.” But most people do
not understand what those terms mean. Even the most experienced
emergency manager may struggle to not only get the NWS terminology correct
but convey that message internally and to the public. The public needs to
know if a weather disaster is imminent or possible — or if bad weather will
just cause inconvenience.
Fortunately,
the NWS has committed to
making some “plain language” changes to their alerts in 2026. One helpful
benchmark may be the UK, where they use a color-coded warning
impact matrix that tells you how likely the event is and what impact
it will have. Red indicates a very high likelihood of a very high-impact
weather event.
Standardization of terminology that drives decisions on
protective actions is essential. The catastrophic California wildfires of 2017 and 2018 exposed
inconsistencies that often led to confusion among the public at the very
moment that clarity and certainty were needed.
When
the Thomas
fire began in Ventura County, California, on December 4, 2017,
Ventura County immediately began evacuations using the words “mandatory” and
“voluntary,” depending on the area’s threat level. After destroying over a
thousand homes and killing a woman, the fire marched into Santa Barbara
County, where our policy had been to use the terms “evacuation order” and
“evacuation warning.” But for days the public had been hearing, and were now
educated on, the terms used in Ventura County, where authorities were still
issuing new evacuations.
I was the director of the Santa Barbara County Office of
Emergency Management and part of the leadership team overseeing the fire
response. Rather than use our terminology we chose to align with the
neighboring county by using “voluntary” and “mandatory” for the tens of
thousands of people we would evacuate. When we had to call for evacuations
again prior to the torrential rains that fell on the burn-scarred mountains
above Montecito, we continued using these terms.
The
terminology may have caused confusion and contributed to lives being lost
when people in the “voluntary” evacuation area chose to stay. California law
enforcement agencies came together in 2020 to standardize
the terminology: “evacuation order,” “evacuation warning,” “shelter in
place.”
This
standardization of terminology needs to be used and emulated across the
country. The terms “mandatory evacuation” and particularly “voluntary
evacuation” should be discontinued; they are only causing confusion. People
in threatened areas should be either ordered to evacuate now or warned there
is a possibility they will be evacuated, giving them valuable time to
prepare.
Preparing before disaster strikes Most disasters cross jurisdictional lines and involve many
agencies. When each jurisdiction and agency individually issues critical
information to the public, that inevitably leads to confusion and mistakes.
Bringing all these entities together into a joint information center at one central location
improves the ability to deliver a consistent and complete message. It also
gives bench strength to smaller entities with limited communications staff.
But all of these intersecting agencies must practice
together long before a disaster occurs. They should agree upon and
create press release templates, websites and interactive maps. They should
identify a call center location to field inquiries and pick a location where
they will all hold press conferences. Waiting until a disaster strikes will
result in a community distrusting disjointed messaging, thereby reducing the
number of people who will leave when told to evacuate.
Similarly,
people — especially in disaster-prone areas — should consider ahead of time
how they would act if asked to evacuate.
For many years wildland fire agencies have
been using the “Ready, Set, Go!” method to prepare a community for the
steps they must take when wildfire is a threat. Their homes should be “ready”
for fire season. When a wildfire is nearby, residents need to get “set” by
loading their car, checking on elderly and disabled neighbors and moving
large animals such as horses to a safer place. Then be ready to “go” if
imminently threatened or ordered to evacuate.
Following the 2018 Montecito debris flow disaster, this clear messaging was successfully used to prepare people for more approaching atmospheric river storms that continued to threaten the community below the denuded mountains. We could see that instructing people to be “ready” and “set” improved residents’ response to the evacuation order when we said “go.” This type of messaging could easily be adapted for hurricanes, floods and storms as well as emergencies involving dams and nuclear or chemical facilities. We have plenty of knowledge and experience supported by endless
studies and incident reports showing how we can improve evacuations. We have
to apply this in a way that moves people to heed warnings. If we do not, we
will continue to see a repeat of evacuation failures and an unnecessary loss
of life. Local
authorities must prioritize evacuation preparedness including having adequate
staffing, incorporating lessons learned, crafting standardized messaging,
updating alert systems and increasing community education. A community must
see that when an evacuation is ordered it is confidently
followed. If we learn key lessons from past emergencies, we can do better. |
Monday, July 1, 2024
Why people ignore the warning to flee. We must get better at evacuating people | CNN July 2024
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