Fire Science Show
Fire Science Show
215 - Lessons from the 2018 Camp Fire with Eric D. Link
The devastating 2018 Camp Fire in Paradise, California serves as a haunting reminder of how rapidly wildfires can overwhelm communities. We have not known anything like it - the flames raced through Paradise at four miles per hour, 30,000 residents had mere minutes to evacuate, and many couldn't escape in time. What happens when the fire goes worse than worst case scenario, but still people need to escape? How do we protect lives when escape routes are blocked by fire or gridlocked traffic?
Dr. Eric D. Link, NIST's researcher in the groundbreaking ESCAPE Project, takes us deep into these critical questions. The project's findings reveal how temporary refuge areas saved over 1,200 lives during the Camp Fire when people couldn't outrun the flames. These ad-hoc safe zones – parking lots, road intersections, and open spaces with reduced fuel loads – provided crucial protection when primary evacuation plans collapsed.
The conversation explores how communities can prepare for these worst-case scenarios by pre-identifying Temporary Fire Refuge Areas (TFRAs) throughout their neighbourhoods. Unlike traditional wildfire safety zones that require enormous clearance, TFRAs offer practical, achievable alternatives that acknowledge the realities of wildland-urban interface communities. The key insight? Even perfect evacuation plans can fail when fires move too quickly, so communities need backup options.
We also delve into the concept of "decision zones" for evacuation planning, the challenges of "no-notice fire events," and the potential for developing dedicated fire shelters that could protect large groups during extreme fire conditions. With climate change intensifying wildfire behavior and more communities at risk, these lessons from Paradise provide crucial guidance for protecting lives when evacuation isn't possible.
Read further on the ESCAPE project findings at the amazing NIST repository (in general, reading the NIST repository is a good life advice :)): https://www.nist.gov/publications/wui-fire-evacuation-and-sheltering-considerations-assessment-planning-and-execution-0
NIST dedicated webpage with more resources, especially for community managers: https://www.nist.gov/publications/wui-fire-evacuation-and-sheltering-considerations-assessment-planning-and-execution-0
Trigger boundaries podcast episode: https://www.firescienceshow.com/156-trigger-boundaries-with-harry-mitchell-and-nick-kalogeropoulos/
Cover image credit: On the morning of November 8, 2018, the Camp Fire erupted 90 miles (140 kilometers) north of Sacramento, California. By evening, the fast-moving fire had charred around 18,000 acres and remained zero percent contained, according to news reports. The Operational Land Imager on Landsat 8 acquired this image on November 8, 2018, around 10:45 a.m. local time (06:45 Universal Time). The natural-color image was created using bands 4-3-2, along with shortwave infrared light to highlight the active fire. Officials evacuated several towns, including Paradise. They also closed several major highways.
NASA, Joshua Stevens - https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/144225/camp-fire-rages-in-california
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Hello everybody, welcome to the Fire Science Show. Learning from mistakes, learning from stuff that went wrong, is a general, good life advice, and learning from things that went wrong in fires is something absolutely critical for our profession. Fires are, on the one hand, rare, so they don't give you that many opportunities to learn, and they're often big tragedies. So, yeah, we really do not want those losses or casualties. Anyway, studying fires can give you remarkable insights into what we're doing, how we're doing it and how we can do better, and I especially appreciate good case studies around fires that happened, and, of course, one of such case studies is what is being discussed today in the podcast episode.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:In 2018, there was a massive wildfire in California. It was named Camp Fire, and NIST pursued a big research project and big investigation into this fire. It was named the Escape Project, and one of the leading scientists in that project, dr Eric D Link, is my today's podcast guest. In this research and, by the way, escape is an acronym, but I'll leave Eric to decipher it for you in the podcast episode In this research, they've studied the campfire events in massive detail to uncover what happened and how did our evacuation of that community look like? What could have been better, what actually saved some lives. So we have not only bad things but also good insights and one thing that I really really like from this episode. I will not tell you about the fire itself. Eric will tell you in the interview. But even if you have a plan to escape, even if you have a plan on how to evacuate the committee yes, it's critically important to have a plan, but not always everything goes to the plan. And what I really appreciate in this project is that it recognizes that stuff may not go as planned and prepares for that. It prepares some intermediate actions, intermediate solutions, recognizes that stuff may not go as planned and prepares for that, prepares some intermediate actions, intermediate solutions which can save lives in an imperfect environment, and I really like that. So, escape Project a very interesting conversation on lessons learned from the campfire with Eric Link from NIST. Let's spin the intro and jump into the episode.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:Welcome to the Firesize Show. My name is Wojciech Wigrzyński and I will be your host. The Fire Science Show is into its third year of continued support from its sponsor, ofr Consultants, who are an independent, multi-award-winning fire engineering consultancy with a reputation for delivering innovative safety driven solutions. As the UK leading independent forest consultancy, ofr's globally established team, have developed a reputation for preeminent fire engineering expertise, with colleagues working across the world to help protect people, property and the plant. Established in the UK in 2016 as a startup business by two highly experienced fire engineering consultants, the business continues to grow at a phenomenal rate, with offices across the country in eight locations, from Edinburgh to Bath, and plans for future expansions. If you're keen to find out more or join OFR Consultants during this exciting period of growth, visit their website at ofrconsultants. com.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:And now back to the episode. Hello everybody, I am joined today by Eric D Link from NIST. Hey, eric, good to have you in the podcast. Great to be here. Thank you, very welcome. And an important topic we have to cover, that is, evacuation in case of wildfires To some extent, the kind of evacuation that happens kind of late, or how do we provide safety to those who evacuate. The reason is an escape project, project called Escape that has been carried out by NIST and that's what we're going to discuss in this episode. So perhaps let's start with introducing the project itself, like how did it start and what was your initial goal? We'll talk about the achievements later, but I wonder if the initial goal is is the same as what you've achieved in the end. So let's start with the beginning sure?
Eric D. Link:so actually, the the beginning of escape actually comes before the escape project itself and its relation to the campfire which which happened in Northern California in 2018. And so ESCAPE project ESCAPE is an acronym that we came up with that means evacuation and sheltering considerations, assessment, planning and execution, so ESCAPE is just a nicer way to roll that off the tongue.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:I guess the name came before the chat, but I mean people make acronyms out of anything today with the chatbot. But I see it's extremely impressive when someone did that before the chatbot era, so congratulations. It's a lovely acronym.
Eric D. Link:Yeah, I think credit goes to my colleague, Alex Marangidis, who is instrument in all of this work and came up with that acronym on his own, I believe.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:So, wow, all of this work and came up with that acronym on his own, I believe.
Eric D. Link:Wow, congratulations, alex, for the acronym and for the project as well. So what was the initial idea and how it came to life? So it really came to life when we embarked on a long-term case study of the Camp Fire incident in 2018. That fire very quickly spread into multiple towns, namely Paradise, california. About 30,000 people there had to evacuate with very little notice, and so, as we were doing the case study, we encountered a tremendous amount of life safety hazards and risks that were experienced by thousands of people during their evacuation, and these findings were very specific to the incident. Each fire incident has its own unique pieces, but also a lot of commonalities between them, so we wanted to take the specific findings from the Camp Fire evacuation and make them more generalized so that fire engineers and communities and residents had actionable items that they could take away from the specific incident.
Eric D. Link:Because since the Camp Fire we've seen additional life safety risks in other fires internationally, be it in Greece or Australia, rapid fire spread, people being rescued off the beach and things like that, and then in the United States also in Hawaii and in LA most recently. These types of events seem to be happening more frequently and we'd love to be more prepared in a community sense for evacuations.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:What's the geography of the Paradise area? Is it like mountainous? Is it like flat at the beach, at the ocean? California is a big state as far as I know.
Eric D. Link:Right, yeah, so Paradise itself is in the foothills of the mountains, so on one side of town is lower elevation in the valley in Northern California, and then you go up a thousand feet or so up a ridge and then you get into the town of Paradise itself, and the geography there is actually pretty unique in that a lot of the roadway access depends on these ridges, and so there's limited access to and from the community itself, and so that in Paradise and in many other instances causes difficulties with evacuation when there's a limited number of routes. Was there?
Wojciech Wegrzynski:anything super special about that fire. I mean, it's horrible to say, but we seem to have like the worst fires every few years. Like I think out of worst fires in 20th century, 19 or 18 of them happened in like last few years.
Eric D. Link:So at the time it was the largest in terms of destroyed structures and at the time, it led to 85 direct fatalities which was you know, the most catastrophic in recent history in the United States. So those were contributing factors, as you mentioned. Of course we've had comparable disasters in the years since it's kind of horrible, isn't it?
Wojciech Wegrzynski:It's like yeah.
Eric D. Link:Yeah, so in that sense, unfortunately, a lot of them are very similar, a lot of common traits among the incidents Typically fast-moving fire moving too fast for notification and evacuation to occur before the fire comes, whether or not the perfect plan was in place beforehand. Even perfect plans came to keep up with some of these fires, and so that's sort of the takeaway from some of this case study and sort of the goal in terms of planning ahead in the future.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:Can we try to summarize how the fire looked like and what went wrong in the evacuation that you found a need to respond to with the escape project?
Eric D. Link:Sure, so a few things, one just the size of the fire and the geography of the area. So very quickly the fire overcame the smaller community, mountain community of Konkow, which the fire impacted before notifications could be sent out, and so that complicates evacuations, of course, if people are still sleeping. This was about six o'clock in the morning, so a bit early for people to be awake.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:Can you narrow down, like when the fire initiated and when it reached the community? Are we talking about hours or we're talking less than one hour?
Eric D. Link:Less than one hour? Oh, okay, less than one hour and a kilometer away, or?
Wojciech Wegrzynski:more. Okay, okay, okay, okay, yeah. So that was a community next to the Paradise Kankau.
Eric D. Link:Yes, just to the east between where the fire started and between Paradise, yes, and so they had no time really to react before the fire was impacting their evacuation Between Kankau and Paradise. The fire expanded and so that the length of the fire as it impacted the town of Paradise was almost the entire length or width of the community, and so that large area of impact affected many people at the same time, including one of the primary four evacuation routes. So that blocked that, and then at the same time time, there were dozens of spot fires that ignited deeper into the community itself and further blocked additional roadways, and so really, just the town became overrun with fire very quickly before most people could make it out I guess between the kankawa and paradise.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:It must have been some time. So was there a call for like a complete evacuation of the Paradise community? I mean, you said 30,000 people down, so it's not a small group of people to evacuate. I assume it's a morning so it's also perhaps not optimal to reach everyone. Was it a working day? People were going to their work and had to come back home to pick stuff.
Eric D. Link:It was a working day. So, yeah, the fire started about 6.30 in the morning and by eight o'clock in the morning there were spot fires in the town of Paradise, okay, several kilometers away from the initial ignition, and then, very quickly, in the next half hour, a large portion of the town was burning. Wow, that is blowing my mind. By 10 am, half of the town was burning and the roads were very backed up because two of the main evacuation routes of the four were blocked by fire and by traffic jam. Yeah, so.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:Wow, I had no intimate knowledge about that fire and as you described it. So wow, it blows my mind. I'm used to building fires. If, if I have a large building like a warehouse or a shopping mall and I have like a course of fire like that, I would be terrified. And you're speaking about and you're speaking about communities and cities, somehow.
Eric D. Link:Absolutely so. The quest for evacuations very quickly went from a few zones on the eastern part of the town about eight o'clock where the fire first started, and very quickly ordered the entire town to evacuate. They had a plan, an evacuation plan in the town and it was mostly considering a partial evacuation for a few zones at a time. Of course that's not the fire scenario that they experienced and the best solution was to evacuate everybody at once almost and you know, as emergency managers and firefighters and engineers know, there's only so much capacity for the roadway to handle that influx. Not everybody is going to get out very easily in that scenario. Sort of the gap that we're missing in evacuation planning is, while we would like everybody to be able to evacuate before the fire, of course that's the safest solution to not experience the fire directly at all.
Eric D. Link:We see this case and other cases since then where it's just not possible. The fire ignites too closely, it spreads too quickly, there's too many people in these areas. So all of these factor together and in the Camp Fire we saw 17 different instances within the fire where civilians, but most of them, were able to survive through the use of temporary refuge areas under the direction of firefighters and first responders. And the temporary refuge area is this ad hoc emergency use sort of small clearing area with reduced fuel. It could be a parking lot the middle of a roadway intersection. Other park areas, whether they're maintained natural areas or even unmaintained areas, like an overgrown meadow, for example, can have reduced fire exposure compared to being deep in the community or in the forest or other hazard areas. So sort of they're the best location at the time with reduced exposure. So sort of they're the best location at the time with reduced exposure. And at least 1,200 people from our case study we identified having used these temporary refuge areas so that they could survive.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:I know that the temporary fire refuge areas are a big outcome of the project. We will definitely come back to them with more details. I would love to understand how a fire engineer can contribute to a community and assist in designing a space that is not an ad hoc. It's actually meant to serve as a refuge area. You mentioned that the Paradise City had some sort of evacuation plan. What kind of goes into plan like that plan? What kind of goes into plan like that? What kind of procedure does it involve and how compromised it gets when the fire spreads so rapidly?
Eric D. Link:Yeah, so of course there's no standardized evacuation plan, so it gets a bit complicated to compare community to community. That's something that engineers fire engineers could help with in the future too, because what could go into this plan would be community geography. What evacuation routes exist? What are the hazards along those routes that need to be kept in mind? Could some of them be affected by fire spread? And if they are, what's the plan?
Wojciech Wegrzynski:That's actually a big one, but it kind of comes in the hindsight right. If you know that so many routes half of the routes you said were blocked by the fire In hindsight perhaps we should have a plan for not being able to use all of them? Was it already part of the original plan, or is it something that we learned from the disaster?
Eric D. Link:So I think that's something that is learned from the disaster so I think that's something that is learned from the disaster is that, unfortunately, the worst case scenario is more catastrophic than previous fire history maybe showed us, and that planning for the worst case scenario, you may have to stretch your imagination a little bit, and fires since then have shown that. That is probably true If we look to sort of fires before about 2017, so even before the Camp Fire but if we look to history, it's hard to see an example of this type of fire affecting evacuation in this way. So using history to guide our future planning might not work anymore. And since 2017, we've seen I can't even count them now a dozen of these fires that affect evacuation in ways we hadn't seen before. Do you?
Wojciech Wegrzynski:see a lot of similarities between those other fires and the Paradise, or each is kind of a unique case study with its own challenges.
Eric D. Link:Yeah. So without having done a case study of the others, I don't know the details, but from anecdotal information from some of the other research work that's been done on these individual fires, from the news reports, there are a lot of similarities among them. So while the details might be specific, other aspects are seen across incidents A lot of congestion, traffic jams, infrastructure failures whether it's collapsing of power poles or electrical lines, blocking roadways, outage for communications or electrical throughout things, and just the complexities of the dynamic event as to a general thing of what happens if this evacuation route gets blocked or what if the fire comes from this direction. But it might not just be one of these bad events that happens. Typically in these catastrophic things, it's multiple contributing factors.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:I mean now, as you say, it feels kind of obvious that there's a plan which is like the baseline, and from that you have to adapt to the current situation. I'm a fire engineer by trade and I'm not sure if I could figure out a really complex fire strategy ad hoc at 8 am with fire at my doorstep. I think we do not appreciate the amount of stress over the people who take um decisions. That's why procedures are in place. Like in the situation of high stress, the decision making is compromised. Therefore, relying on procedure is perhaps your safest bet, because you simply execute something and you don't, you know think. It's my own interpretation and it comes from my experience in training. I'm not saying this is the best research approach, but I see that it is a challenge to set up a fail-proof, you know set of procedures and at the same time, I feel coming up with decision making on site also comes with a lot of its own challenges, especially in such a high stress situation when you have a fire consuming your entire city.
Eric D. Link:So, yeah, I absolutely agree with that, and that just means that planning is even more important, because if you have a plan and you have somewhere to start from, you know maybe what is supposed to happen If this evacuation route gets blocked. This is how we would respond, and so you've at least thought about that and practice that to some extent, so that when the plan breaks, you have a starting point and you're not making everything up from the get go. And that includes the reaction plan, the communication plan. Who needs to be involved? Who needs to know these things before an event? Who's going to help you out? Whether it's law enforcement, the fire service, public transportation, volunteers, neighboring communities, it's a big network that needs to be involved neighboring communities.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:It's a big network that needs to be involved. I wonder have you tried to simulate the ability to escape that area with vehicles, Because I assume vehicle evacuation would be the first approach? Was there even a capacity that could actually handle those tens of thousands of people? Or it was doomed at the start because there was no way the traffic network could handle such a big amount of vehicles in such short time?
Eric D. Link:Yeah, I think if We'd have to define what short time we would want people to get out in, but I'm not aware of any modeling that was done beforehand to even estimate what the capacity was.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:And did you post-fire analyze that? Was there even a chance that they could all evacuate safely by vehicles? I wonder simply if evacuating such a big community can inevitably lead to gridlock, Because it's an image that you see a lot in the news Like. A lot of my knowledge on those types of fires is limited to what the news show or what I see on TwitterX whatever you call it now these days, and usually those images are people stuck in traffic. So I wonder if this traffic jam is an inherent piece of dire evacuation.
Eric D. Link:I expect that it is because there's so many people and not everybody is going to know the optimal route, even if there was no obstruction or emergency. So even if everybody did know the optimal route without an emergency and they followed that, right now we're getting into human behavior complications, which you've had several people on the show talk about in depth. Now we know that's very complex. So we found that just the sheer number of people and I think, if we look ahead toward escape and planning for the future, that this is something that communities will need to know to some extent. How long will it you require to evacuate your community? And it might be a long time, it probably will be a long time, but we have to deal with that fact just because we want it to be faster and we want to prevent evacuations for fires that start a very far distance away. It is what it is. If the fire is coming in two hours but it takes you three hours to evacuate, you need to evacuation, it's just nice for people Like I can imagine.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:if you have better connection of your town to the surroundings through better road network, it just improves your day-to-day life and, by the way, it significantly increases your evacuation capacity. I think I like that point because it's actionable and it's something that politicians can use to back up the decisions to spend millions on traffic infrastructure. Sometimes they would say, oh, you don't need this road in this community because there's only like 500 people. We need a third road somewhere else. But sometimes this one road could actually be the event that you need to offload a big piece of community in case of evacuation.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:I am not sure if such considerations are today a part of designing communities. Perhaps in some more forward-looking communities, perhaps in communities that were struck by a disaster which you know brutally, have learned a very tough lesson about what it means to not have sufficient escape capacity. But as well, I think you say you see this all the time. I see it all the time in the news. I guess that's the future. In the future, I fully see engineers like us, like listeners of this podcast, actively engaged in decision making at the community level on how to plan large scale evacuation pathways to offload this traffic. I think that that's one very interesting outcome of investigating that you need to be pretty well prepared beforehand. Really A lot of lessons from campfires. Tell me how this was translated into actionable guidance of the ESCAPE project. How did the work in between look like?
Eric D. Link:the investigation and and your recommendations so we came up with, you know, the list of of technical findings specific to the incident and those include details of you know how many people were rescued and used temporary refuge areas for survival.
Eric D. Link:How many were there?
Eric D. Link:What was the traffic conditions through the town?
Eric D. Link:Tried to generalize that in a way that could apply to other communities, and the first thing that came up was just the sheer number of temporary refuge areas that were required.
Eric D. Link:So we identified 31 different locations that were used this way in the campfire, and they were used all during the incident and geographically diverse areas. So the main finding is that people need to know where safer areas are and how to get to them, and there need to be a number of them, because the roadways can be blocked or there can be congestion that prevents you from getting to any number of them, and by having more in a distributed area around town, that increases the chances that people will be able to access them. The other component of this was that in the campfire they were all generally ad hoc, meaning people were stuck on the road, the fire was coming, they had nowhere to go, and so a firefighter or a police officer was there to coordinate them to move into the safest location nearby, and we can envision that as like a large parking lot, you know, a commercial area, large open space, limited vegetation.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:What are you protecting against? Radiation? Firebrands, smoke, low oxygen content. What's the hazard?
Eric D. Link:really the hazard immediately would be radiation and direct flames. Okay, that would be the initial worry is that people are stuck in traffic, they can't move because of gridlock and the fire is coming and if they don't take action they'll burn in their vehicle.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:And they're sitting in a very good fuel loaded vehicle, yeah, with plastics and everything Right, very combustible Of course.
Eric D. Link:Yeah, so the idea here is to have locations identified ahead of time where, if people are stuck on the roadway or there's not enough time to evacuate, people can take refuge temporarily in these locations that completely shared.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:I guess that would be awesome, but it's not required, right? It's more about providing sufficient space and distance from the hazard, I assume.
Eric D. Link:Yeah, that's correct. So it would be awesome to have the concrete bunker with air control and everything that you described, and I would classify that more as a fire shelter.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:Okay.
Eric D. Link:We can talk about that again. Shelter we can talk about that again. First, the immediate action. Something that exists in communities now, or could more readily be created in a community, is an open space that has free access in emergency, where there's less concentration of fuels, whether it's vegetation along the roadway, or if you're in a community and structures and vehicles and things are parked along the roadway, that's not a safe place to be stuck in traffic as the fire is coming. So by identifying these locations ahead of time, the first responders can use that as their backup plan if the evacuation will not be complete in time.
Eric D. Link:And we've transitioned the terminology here from a temporary refuge area to a temporary fire refuge area to distinguish that. There's two concepts here, the first being the ad hoc use and the second being the pre-planned intentional identification of these areas. And the name that we came up with there is very intentional. It's temporary and the fact that it is you will have to leave there eventually. It may only provide a safer place for a short period of time.
Eric D. Link:Fire, because it's related to fire specifically, we could consider other refuge areas for other incidents that may not be appropriate in fire. Some of the recent things in Hawaii and around the Pacific with the tsunami issue right, a tsunami refuge area may not meet the same requirements as a temporary fire refuge area. So a little bit of distinction to be made there. And then refuge rather than safety, because our interpretation of the word safety or a safe area is that I can camp out here, I will be safe in this area. But these areas are not up to the same stringent definition of safety. They're safer than if you were stuck in your car, on the roadway or in the forest, but they're still going to be hazardous because of radiation, because of flames, because of smoke. So it's not the first choice. The first choice, hopefully, would always be to evacuate.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:So it's not that, like I live in a house and I know there's a temporary fire refuge area at the corner, a wildfire is incoming, I'm supposed to evacuate there. It's more like I'm evacuating, I reach a point where I cannot move anymore. I seek the closest temporary fire refuge area at this point as a backup. That is our approach yes. Okay, what would be technical requirements towards the temporary, like what an area would need to be to constitute as a good candidate for a temporary far refuge area?
Eric D. Link:So ideally they would be clear of fuel, whether it's vegetative or community fuel, it could be managed fuel. So spaces like parks or golf courses or parking lots that are larger open spaces, Ideally they would not have a lot of structures or larger fuels nearby. Of course, in a community it's hard to avoid these fuels, but there are spaces with increased spacing between buildings and things and the idea is to just have a space that's large enough for a certain number of people to congregate. That would be a safer distance from any flame exposure. Ultimately, what it will not do is prevent embers or prevent smoke hazards.
Eric D. Link:So, as we think about implementing this in an engineering sense or community practice. Having storage of respirators or N95 masks or something to help the smoke issue in these places might be, you know, a good idea to have available and like a cabinet that is there ready in case that somebody needs it.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:Well, that requires maintenance and supply and everything. So and I assume it's on the community to maintain that. So I guess some of those would be better equipped, some of those would be worse equipped. Fortunately, the space is like a passive thing that doesn't change over time, and it's more about maintenance. Does it require any sort of specific communication, or you rely on a communication that people have with their cell phones? I'm not sure how common connection issues through cell phones are in those wildfires, but I would assume that the cell network is also to some extent overburdened with so many people escaping.
Eric D. Link:Yeah, oftentimes the cell connection is compromised, either from fire burning the infrastructure or the smoke, or the number of people trying to access the network, or electrical failure. So unfortunately, notification is going to be up to the evacuees or the firefighters on the location to say you know, assess the situation and say, ok, we cannot evacuate any further, we have to take refuge and this is the place to do so. And it's admittedly a very challenging component. This evacuation, the whole evacuation challenge, is education of the public and how to recognize these situations, to understand that there can be fire scenarios where it's too fast and you will not get a notification. Ideally communities will have this as part of the plan. There'll be some sort of education ahead of time for what the purpose of these temporary fire refuge areas is, and it is a paradigm shift in the way we think about response to fire, both from the public and from firefighters.
Eric D. Link:But eventually we'll get to a point where people understand the options to fully evacuate. First, if we can't, we use the temporary fire refuge area and we'll stay there until it's safe to move on. And that's where it requires pre-planning as well, because the fire service will need to know where these locations are to expect that there might be people taking refuge there. To check on these places, as they're available, to support the people that are there and provide them with direct information. Okay, stay here. This is the best place for you to stay, or no, the road away ahead is safe. Follow us and we will take you, you know, to a real safe location out of the fire on the project web page, which is, by the way, linked in the show notes for anyone listening.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:If you would like to learn more, there are resources in the show notes that you are very welcome to look into. I see a drawing of a wildfire safety zone. Is it something higher level that provides some sort of safety? Because I see the words you choose your words very carefully and this one actually includes safety in the name. So if you could tell me about this concept includes safety in the name.
Eric D. Link:So if you could tell me about this concept. Yes, so in the wildland firefighting world there is a distinction between safety zone and temporary refuge area, and the safety zone has a very specific definition, which is that it is an area large enough for a firefighter to take shelter without the use of a fire shelter or other protective equipment. And so in the wildland fire sense this is a very large space. The guidance is generally eight times the vegetation height, and so in forested areas we can imagine a quite large area required to meet this definition, and that's in the use of firefighting. If we want to apply this same concept to protection of civilians who do not have the communications, they do not have the protective equipment, they do not have the experience of a wildland firefighter, and we could have hundreds of people in one location. Now we're talking about a large area required to have a safety zone, and in WUI communities, areas this large may be very difficult to come by.
Eric D. Link:They might not exist now, and to create them may require expensive fuel modification, expensive in terms of constructing them and maintaining them and ecologically expensive to modify vegetation at large scale, assuming that there's no built environment prohibiting kind of fuel modification.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:Yet perhaps if you're in a mountainous area, this could be still cheaper than building two or three more roads, if this would have a capacity to, because I assume this is a location where people could evacuate to, as their default location where they are supposed to evacuate, or this is also like just go through area and you're supposed to move further away?
Eric D. Link:The idea of the safety zone is generally a place that you could stay. Now, depending on the size of the community and the number of people that you expect to need to use, it could make it feasible in certain communities more than others. Fire right is that the post-fire environment is also very hazardous for civilians, so there will have to be some plan for getting people back to civilization if you will out of the safety zone after the immediate hazard is passed.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:What is the temporal scale of the hazard? For how long you need to keep people safe? Is it a matter of hours? Is it days? How long until a fire passes through a community at this scale? Because I also assume if a fire moves very quickly and there's an extremely large fire, conservation of energy kicks in. It must burn through the fuel fairly fast, so it's unlikely it's going to last days. What time scales are we with speaking about?
Eric D. Link:right. Yeah, I would generally say on the order of a couple hours. Of course it depends on the, the access roadways and where you are in relation and sort of which direction the fire is going. Um, so it also depends what the evacuation network of roads looks like.
Eric D. Link:So you could imagine, and actually it was used in the campfire these refuge areas were used in two different ways. One is what we've been talking about, the immediate reduction in exposure for safety. The second is for a prolonged period of time to prevent people from encountering such conditions. So the fire impacts the community and you haven't been able to evacuate, but you're currently in a safe area. The fire is continuing to spread through the town or outside of the town along the evacuation route, and so it's not safe to continue to evacuate. And so it's not safe to continue to evacuate, and staying in this location is the safest for now, until the fire passes completely, and then it's safe to evacuate. Or, if there's other hazards like power lines or things blocking evacuation, you may be in one of these temporary fire refuge areas for several hours until the road is cleared by the firefighters and you're able to evacuate more completely.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:You said we can come back to fire shelter later. Maybe that's a good moment to revisit that. So if I wanted to design a structure that's capable of providing shelter, how would that look like?
Eric D. Link:Yeah, so it would look like, you know, in the best terminology that I can think of today, in the current building environment it would look like a bunker, I think, because what we would like from a fire shelter is basically the fireproof building fire applications. That's very difficult to achieve because we have direct flame ignition, we have ember or firebrand ignition that we have to prevent and we have to prevent that from occurring sort of on its own. We can't expect in these large wooey fire events to have enough firefighters to put out every fire that might ignite on every structure In the United States. When we think about shelters for other emergencies, we think of buildings that typically have more robust construction, like schools or hospitals and even fire stations, Right.
Eric D. Link:But time and time again we see that these buildings burn in wildland or urban interstate case fires. So even what we consider, as you know, strong buildings still burn today, and so we need to sort of adapt the construction practices to better withstand exposure. And then the second component is the air quality issue in shelter. So we would like shelters to be able to provide clean air for an unknown amount of time until it's safe to leave. So I think there's a lot of work to be done in developing a fire shelter that's usable at a community scale.
Eric D. Link:You know there's commercial offerings available now, sort of like safe rooms and whatnot, but they're not designed to accommodate a large number of people, certainly at the community scale. It's not clear yet you know what the expected duration of occupancy is for these types of fire shelters. How do you know when to enter? How do you know when it's safe to exit? What's the air supply? Is there food and water? All of these types of things would need to go into consideration for a community scale fire shelter.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:I see a challenge with this because while you are able to build a road and it serves the community, without a fire, I struggle to quickly imagine attributes that make building nice and useful and likable by the community are the ones that exclude it being a good fire shelter and vice versa. Like a good fire shelter is not going to be a great community center, like if you have a ton of windows and a porch in front of it. That kind of kills the purpose. So probably a more challenging but yet interesting consideration.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:In my country, in Poland, I guess now, with the war in Ukraine across our border, perhaps easier to provide because we are worried about places of shelter, not necessarily wildfires, more about rockets, drones and other weapons rockets, drones and and other weapons. But I guess this is a purpose that would be to some what aligned with the wildfire prevention, because it would be very similar attributes, whereas in the in, in a country where you have a long-lasting peace and no, we mean it in threats of war. I guess that's challenging, but still I think it's an important piece. And and I think that's challenging, but still I think it's an important piece and I think if fire engineers could figure out how to create dual-purpose buildings that could be like high school hall for some sort of auditorium, or a big building, a semi-theater of some sort, and at the same very quickly transitionable into a good wildfire shelter. I think if such dual-purpose buildings were invented and pre-designed, we would have a lot of workers, fire engineers, because I think a lot of communities would want those.
Eric D. Link:I agree and I think it's possible. There's still work to be done to define standards for what exactly we need. But you know, we know the whole list of vulnerabilities for structures and there are construction methods and materials that can be employed to mitigate these vulnerabilities. So I think you know it's a matter of time before the research and standards get us there and the engineers can design and build such locations.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:We're running out of time and there's so much to talk for the listeners. The report that I've linked in the show notes it's very long. It also has like a whole actionable plan of how to approach safety in your community Very interesting. But for this interview I would love to cover no-notice events and trigger zones, decision zones as well. So first let's do the no-notice fire events. I guess it is what the name says fire events without sufficient time to notify people. You've mentioned that the first community was struck in a matter of hours from the fire start. So what was the finding? What's the recommendation?
Eric D. Link:Yeah. So I think it's just generally what can we do to prevent fires from igniting in the first place? A lot of fires, particularly in the United States, are human, caused by some extent. So particularly in the United States are a human cause by some extent. So you know, just general fire safety awareness. But then being aware that these fires happen and incorporating that into the plan in some capacity and it's very difficult, you know, I'll admit it, we might not like the answers that we have to respond to these events because they're difficult and challenging, but being aware that they can happen and you know, and having a plan to address what order of operations to be done and pre-planning the decision workflow to make the decision as quickly as possible and issue notifications as quickly as possible to give people as much notice as they can in a no-notice event.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:So it's not about avoiding a no-notice. It's about acknowledging that, no matter what we do, such an event could happen and it's better that we plan ahead for such an outcome, that we have literally no notice and what to do at that point, at that stage, I would say so yeah.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:Okay, well, that's an actionable advice. Actually I like that. That's in the spirit of fire safety engineering, where we assume that the fire is going like. I do not start my engineering projects by discussing what's the probability of a fire, I just assume the fire will be there and I have to design my building to go along with that. So I like that in the spirit of fire safety engineering.
Eric D. Link:And the shift from trigger zones to decision zones there's something like that I found in the reports on the webpage. Yeah, so the terminology spans a few different words. Trigger zones has been used in the past by researchers like Enrico, who you've had on the show and things. The concept is the same. We just sort of adapted the word to decision zone from some feedback from emergency managers that we consulted during this project and that the idea of shifting from trigger zone to decision zone in terminology is that, while events might occur that makes you make a decision, it's not necessarily always you know, the flip of a switch or the pull of a trigger.
Eric D. Link:It's not necessarily always you know the flip of a switch or the pull of a trigger to do so. It's a more deliberate assessment of the conditions. So something will ultimately cause you to make a decision, but it could be a number of factors. And so that you know, just recognizes that the decision process is a little bit more involved oftentimes more involved oftentimes.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:Do you already have some sort of application of the escape framework into a community safety that you work on? Or I see the papers are very fresh, so the recent one is just this year. So I mean it's a very new thing, but I hope it catches up and some communities follow. But I wonder, is there any experience with that already in the practice or in the making?
Eric D. Link:It is in the making. I think several communities are considering implementing this in some fashion, and I mean in a less informal sense. It does exist already. Communities are monitoring the fire situation around their community and they're using the current events to determine whether they need to evacuate or not. This approach that we've presented just formalizes it a bit more in the sense of planning ahead and assessing your community.
Eric D. Link:How much time do you need to evacuate, what resources do you need to conduct the evacuation, what are the vulnerable populations that live in your community and what is the plan to help them? Whether it be schools or hospitals, care homes, where people stay in individual houses and are immobile or don't have transportation ahead of time that you have to do. No matter what the fire does, these people will need to evacuate or need other help. And then compare that to the time until the fire impacts, and that could be a fire that starts 10 miles away. If the fire is going to spread at four miles an hour which they do, we've seen from these you know the campfire about four miles an hour. If it takes you three hours to evacuate the community, you know that's a long way away, that you have to monitor for any ignition and if that ignition has potential to spread into the community, we have to activate the plan that we might not have enough time to evacuate everybody.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:Yeah, I simply have to refer our listeners to the other episode like this in the podcast with Nikolaos Karapoulos and Harry Mitchell from WNAT Project, because that's exactly what they were looking in with modeling how much time you have and when the fire does cross this trigger boundary. They've used terminology of trigger boundaries where basically, once this is crossed, you simply will not have enough time to evacuate. I was wondering how much you know. It's the world of fire. Science and people are competing. I wondered like to what extent this will compete with. But they see, those are complementary, those are very yeah, I don't see a competition here at all.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:Very complementary studies and I would say yours is less idealistic. You know you are the nist study. It acknowledges that humans make errors, that sometimes there's just not enough time. It just you know at some stage you have to drop the idealism away and just get the most out of stuff that you have at hand, because this simply leads to better outcomes. So, yeah, I, I mean I would encourage if any one of the listeners is is working on community evacuation case to look at both of those studies, because both could be very, very useful. Eric, what's next? Where are you going with this? Is this something that will continue at NIST? Are you looking at something new right now? What can we expect in the upcoming years?
Eric D. Link:Yeah, so we're continuing the outreach for this escape mindset. We've just developed a website that is targeted towards communities and community leaders. It's accessible to anybody at escapemistgov and so I encourage anybody who's interested to go check that out. It's intended to be a couple hour sort of dive into the report, targeted towards practitioners, in a friendlier format than a couple hundred page report, to understand a lot of the concepts that we just talked about. Fsri style.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:I like it. Yes, very nice, very nice. The link is in the show notes, so you're one click away from that resource and be happy to share that with decision makers and anyone you know that could benefit from that, because resources like that are scarce and we need to cherish and spread them. Very good and research wise any new case studies, any new investigations ongoing?
Eric D. Link:We're continuing the case study of the Camp Fire. Currently we have a bit more data to crunch looking at, specifically at structure performance and defensive actions by firefighters and contributing to structure survival or damage. So a bit more on Camp Fire still to come. We're looking at experiments for structure vulnerabilities focused on parcel-level combustible fuels and how they spread fire to the primary structure. So that the sheds or fences or trash cans that exist on most parcels are readily ignitable and contribute to the large-scale community fires that we have been seeing.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:Very interesting. Once this is something that's possible to share, make sure to reach out to me. I would love to have that in the podcast as well.
Eric D. Link:All right will do.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:And, yeah, excellent work on the ESCAPE project. Nothing less I've expected from this Great work, as usual. I really appreciate and I here can express the gratitude from the community. Those resources are always rich, always available in the public domain, and we're very thankful for that, because that's not obvious. Even if you publish papers, most or everything literally is available in the public domain for everyone to use. So big thanks for that, on top of doing great fire science and fantastic community service, eric. So please share this with Alexander Marangides, your co-author, and your colleagues at NIST, and keep doing what you're doing, because it's good stuff and that's it. Thank you for listening.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:Escape Project, something you can access online. There is a collection of papers and reports from this project that you can look into, read through. There is this webpage that Eric mentioned, escapenistgov, which gives you some resources for managing communities. I think it's worth sharing with people managing communities, definitely. So there's more than just papers out of this, and the study on Campfire continues. The study on Campfire is continuing to give more insights and I think in the next years we'll have a lot of good resources from the tragic fires of recent years. It's horrible that we had so many tragic fires that make a great case study. The Maui fires, the LA Palisades is a massive case study. We'll definitely have outcomes from those and hopefully, hopefully, prepare better for the future. So I think that would be it for today's episode. I highly recommend you going through the resources that are provided on NIST websites to learn more and also revisiting the content with Imperial about the Winity project, which gave a very interesting insight on how to set up the trigger boundaries around the communities and how to interpret the community asset-asset kind of equation, interpret the community asset asset kind of equation for the community evacuation. So I think it's a very, very interesting complementary resource.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:If you like this episode, you will like that one as well. I've put the link for it conveniently in the show note for you. So that is it for today. Thank you very much for being here with me. In two weeks I'm going to the um es fss conference conference in Slovenia, in Ljubljana. So if you are there, high five to you and let's have a chat. I'm eager to meet fellow European fire scientists and not only European and talk about fire science and the outcomes of those discussions You'll definitely hear in the podcast, as you always do on your Wednesday, thank you. Thank you very much for being here with me and see you always do on your wednesday, thanks you. Thank you very much for being here with me and uh see you here, same place, same time. Bye, bye.