On a warm summer night in 2020, Andrew Firebaugh opened the door of his home in Bonny Doon, California, to let his dogs out. Founded in the eighteen-fifties, Bonny Doon is a mountain community of around twenty-nine hundred people in Santa Cruz County; its dense redwood forest sweeps downhill to the Pacific, dotted with vineyards, artists’ studios, and homes owned by professors and tech workers. Ordinarily, it’s a quiet haven. But, standing in darkness, Andrew saw an orange glow over the next ridge, more than five miles off. He knew that earlier that afternoon, three small blazes, sparked by lightning two days before, had flared up in neighboring San Mateo County, some thirty miles away. The threat had seemed distant. Now charred oak leaves were raining down around his ridge-top yard, borne by a solid breeze.
Andrew, a wiry man in his sixties, had once worked as a “hotshot”—an élite wildland firefighter trained to tackle the most intense and dangerous blazes—and he and his wife, Betsy, were educated about fire. They maintained a hundred-foot “defensible space,” largely cleared of brush and trees, around their ranch-style house; some years before, they had installed a fire-resistant, copper-colored metal roof. They watched the distant fire from their porch and contemplated a dilemma that’s increasingly common in many parts of California: Stay or go?
Wildfires present a unique challenge among natural disasters. In the moment of cataclysm, there’s little that a homeowner can do to protect a house from a hurricane, flood, earthquake, or tornado. But it’s sometimes possible to stay and fend off a wildfire. In Australia, the government has long chosen not to issue mandatory evacuations for wildfires, and studies there have found that houses with defensible spaces are more likely to survive low-intensity fires if owners stay to douse falling embers, which are the primary means by which homes ignite.
And yet staying to fight is exceedingly risky. It’s tempting to hold off on evacuating for as long as possible while planning to leave when conditions get rough. “That’s the worst of the two worlds,” Sarah McCaffrey, a researcher with the U.S. Forest Service in Fort Collins, Colorado, told me. “Evacuating at the last minute is probably the most dangerous thing you can do.” Wildfires can encroach or shift direction with startling speed; exit roads can be cut off. In 2009, a hundred and seventy-three people died in Australia’s Black Saturday firestorm: some would-be early evacuators apparently stayed too long, and many home defenders were overpowered by the fire. (Australian policy now more strongly urges early evacuation.)
In the past, a Californian homeowner might expect to face a stay-or-go decision once in a lifetime. But now the possibility of evacuation hangs over communities in the drought-stricken West almost as a matter of routine. The fire season, once confined roughly to the span between May and October, is becoming increasingly year-round in some parts of the state. Amplified by climate change and mismanaged forestlands, fires are occurring more often, spreading farther and faster, and behaving in extreme and unpredictable ways. Fire agencies can be stretched thin across multiple “megafires,” and blazes are a threat at unexpected times and in unusual locations. Last December, a thousand suburban homes outside of Boulder, Colorado, were destroyed by a rare winter firestorm; residents raced to get out in time, and two people died. This summer, the fire agency in London was outgunned by an outbreak of wildfires during an unprecedented heat wave.
American authorities commonly have the power to order mandatory evacuations. But they are wary of using it, since mass evacuations are unpopular and disruptive. Even when authorities do issue orders, they tend not to force people off their private property. Meanwhile, there’s a scramble to update the systems for deciding on evacuation zones and sending out notices—and an increasing acceptance that, especially in rural and semi-rural places, there is no guarantee that help will come. “There’s this growing recognition that our firefighters might get overwhelmed by certain fires and fire behaviors,” Amanda Stasiewicz, a wildfire expert at San Jose State University, told me. “So it’s really up to you to protect yourself.” For millions of Californians, a new way of life is taking hold. During much of the year, a thread of danger is woven into the everyday; people who used to live lives largely untroubled by natural disasters know that they might be called upon to make agonizing decisions while a blaze bears down upon them.
Stasiewicz studies the practical and behavioral dimensions of wildfire evacuations—aspects which can’t be disentangled, since, in an evacuation, many individual decisions add up to snarled or functional roadways for everyone. Planners, she finds, face thorny trade-offs. Order an evacuation too early, and hopeful or skeptical residents may choose to linger. Order it too late, and they may not have time to get out. At the same time, planners must acknowledge that flight is sometimes impossible, as some people are homebound, or need medical assistance, or need to protect their horses or livestock. There are individuals who will feel that they have no choice but to stay and fight, putting their lives at risk.
The embers landing on the Firebaughs’ driveway emanated from what firefighters call a “complex” fire—a conflagration created when two or more blazes pop up in the same area. In the preceding weeks, unusually hot weather had sapped the landscape dry; the recent lightning strikes actually created two dozen major simultaneous fires across the state. The blazes north of Bonny Doon combined to create the C.Z.U. Lightning Complex Fire, named for the local unit of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire) that mobilized to fight it.
The Firebaughs received no evacuation notice, and so had to navigate the wildfire dilemma on their own. They watched, considered, and concluded that it was best to leave. They planned to drive to a beach and park overnight. Betsy showered, and they packed some essentials—wedding photos, blueprints of their house—into an S.U.V. and a pickup truck. When they drove away with their dogs, at 3 A.M., it didn’t seem to Betsy like an evacuation; they were acting on their own initiative, out of an abundance of caution. But the fire, by lofting its embers miles ahead, would spread by more than forty thousand acres in a twelve-hour period. Its wind-driven growth quickly outpaced the capacities of the firefighting unit and mutual-aid organizations. Not long before the sun came up, the Firebaughs saw that their ridge top was ablaze in bright orange flames that would eventually consume their house.
It wasn’t until later that day that Betsy’s cell phone buzzed with an official alert, relaying orders to evacuate. It had been sent in the middle of the night, but hadn’t come through.
People have been fleeing from disasters forever, and we’ve learned from past evacuations. After the Titanic, ocean liners were required to provide enough lifeboats for all passengers (a lesson in capacity); after deadly fires at the Iroquois Theatre and Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, U.S. building codes were reformed to introduce red lighting above exit doors and mandate fire escapes in new buildings (a lesson in empowering evacuees). Following Hurricane Katrina, in which vulnerable families without cars were left stranded in New Orleans, it was evident that evacuation schemes need to include public-transit arrangements (but, over all, too few emergency agencies have taken such steps).
We’re still learning how to plan for wildfires. Although federal law has long mandated that communities situated near nuclear power plants or industrial facilities develop detailed evacuation plans and drills, no such standards exist for wildfire evacuation. “You can live in a canyon with thousands and thousands of people, and there’s no city, state, or federal law that requires you to have a specific plan to get everyone out,” Thomas Cova, a geographer at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, told me. (There is no law, Cova added, that requires such canyon communities to have more than one egress road.) In the past five years, a raft of state legislative reforms has pushed California agencies to address gaps in wildfire-evacuation and emergency planning; with fifty-eight counties statewide, there’s a great deal of work to be done.
A year after the C.Z.U. fire, I met up with Stasiewicz to drive through the “fire scar” it had left behind. Wearing wraparound shades and with her hair in a ponytail, she guided her turquoise Honda Fit up from the coast toward Bonny Doon, through a part of California known to firefighters as the “asbestos forest” because, in theory, its old-growth redwoods and coastal fog make it unlikely to burn. Our drive started at a lower elevation, where the fire hadn’t spread. The woods were serene in dappled sunlight. Still, there were sights to make an evacuation expert cringe. Although county fire codes required vegetation to be cleared back from the road, it thronged the roadside; removing trees is costly. Overhead, tree branches sometimes reached out to connect and form picturesque archways. “If fire gets up in these canopies, that means you then have things burning over you as you’re evacuating,” Stasiewicz said. Ghostly stands of scorched trees appeared as we ascended—potential fuel that could still burn.
Stasiewicz had done her graduate work in Idaho, studying how ranching communities in the intermountain West coped with wildfires. She planned to cover similar territory in California, and was particularly interested in trust and its role in the C.Z.U. evacuation: Had residents been especially willing to leave if they trusted county officials to tell them when to go? She parked near a cluster of mailboxes so that she could stuff leaflets asking people to participate in her research project. A nearby house was hidden in the woods, behind a thicket of understory that could allow a wildfire to climb to surrounding treetops, and I wondered what calculations its owner, who had been lucky to dodge the C.Z.U. fire, was making to protect himself next time. The fire destroyed nine hundred and eleven homes, and many houses in the region are situated off narrow serpentine roads that make ingress and egress a challenge. A proposed revamp of the state’s fire-safety regulations, which dictate the minimum width of roads, has sparked an intense political battle. Ideally, an exit route should allow at least two cars to drive out side by side, Stasiewicz told me. One lane we had cruised down would hardly allow that. “It’s barely wide enough for a fire truck,” she said.
We drove back to her house, near the beach, in the city of Santa Cruz, and Stasiewicz mused on the contrast between our settled way of life and the habits of Indigenous tribes. Native Americans had once moved around seasonally while stewarding their forests by means of controlled burns. Today, perhaps, wildfires and their evacuations are forcing people to return to a semi-nomadic existence. Stasiewicz has friends with respiratory ailments who can’t tolerate the wildfire smoke that now routinely blankets the West Coast; their new seasonal routine is to move to the East Coast during the hottest months.
Some people would say it’s a younger generational mind-set, she said, parking the car. But, she went on, “it’s a way of being resilient. You’re highly adaptable during fire season.” In her trunk, she has an emergency kit with a hand axe, a hard hat, and a seven-day supply of contact lenses. She plans to purchase a chainsaw. “I'm always thinking worst-case scenario,” she said.
In April of 1991, Indigenous people living on the slopes of Mount Pinatubo, in the Philippines, noticed a sulfurous smell in the air. It was emerging, along with gusts of steam, from a giant crack that had opened in the mountainside. Scientists set up a monitoring system and concluded that an eruption was likely. Around a million people lived near the mountain, and most of them didn’t know it was a volcano; the government rushed out a public-awareness campaign and created evacuation maps and a five-level system of volcanic-activity alerts. On June 15th, the volcano erupted, unleashing a seventeen-mile-high mushroom-like cloud that sparked lightning. A typhoon happened to be moving through, and pounding rains mixed with fiery, superheated avalanches of gas, ash, and molten rock. The decision-making had been fraught and full of uncertainties; the death toll should have been huge. And yet, by the time of eruption, more than sixty thousand people had departed from the zones of greatest peril, many transported by government-arranged buses and trucks. The main eruptions killed around three hundred and fifty people. The evacuation is now a classic study in the field of disaster-response management.
Ideally, as in the case of Pinatubo, evacuations follow a script. Emergency responders recognize a threat, identify at-risk areas, and call for evacuations using warning systems that function well; residents are notified zone by zone and, after making mental and logistical preparations, escape. But, especially in the case of catastrophic wildfires, the script may be easier described than executed. The problem isn’t mass panic of the sort featured in Hollywood movies—research has shown that such panic at moments of disaster is a myth. Instead, systems can stumble for lack of coördination or testing. Even well-laid plans can’t anticipate how a raging fire will interact with the specifics of landscape, weather, and human behavior. In California and the West, many county emergency managers have therefore opted not to create robust wildfire-evacuation plans, arguing that they can’t address the particulars of a blaze until it’s unfolding before them; they don’t want to be locked into designating certain evacuation routes, for example, in case those get breached by flames. But Cova and other evacuation experts argue that doing as much detailed groundwork as possible in advance is worth it, because the process can reveal problems that weren’t otherwise obvious. There is a tao of evacuation planning: you must spend time developing a detailed plan while acknowledging its limitations, so that you can be better poised to improvise as circumstances demand.
To look at any single wildfire catastrophe is to grasp the huge number of factors that planners and residents must confront both beforehand and in the moment. A prime example is what happened in the town of Paradise, California, in 2018. The town’s managers had had the foresight to craft a wildfire-evacuation plan, identifying egress routes and conducting, in 2016, a community drill. But participation was low, and a few years prior the town had unwisely decided to narrow part of the primary evacuation thoroughfare from four lanes to two. No one anticipated an apocalypse that would overpower all their systems. In November of 2018, state fire officials learned of a fire ignition near the town; within ninety minutes, they’d told the county sheriff to issue evacuation orders for a limited number of areas. But the fire, driven by howling winds, spread at a speed beyond their experience, and they were slow to issue further orders.
As the journalist Lizzie Johnson has reported, in “Paradise: One Town's Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire,” a wider evacuation commenced only after an emergency dispatcher for Cal Fire, alarmed by calls from residents, jumped the chain of command to have the sheriff evacuate the entire town. By then, it was too late. Flames engulfed most of the main escape roads, and gridlock ensued as thousands of cars jammed the primary evacuation route, surrounded by flames. Eighty-five people, many elderly and trapped at home, died in what has become known as the Camp Fire—the deadliest inferno in California history.
The Camp Fire was a shocking lesson in threat evaluation. It showed fire officials that they needed to call for evacuations far sooner in extreme wildfires rather than waiting for a more complete picture of the threat. At the same time, it underscored the limits of alerting technology. Officials in Paradise had relied upon an opt-in emergency-messaging system called CodeRED, but only a small proportion of residents register for such systems. Many evacuation experts recommend using a federal Amber Alert-style system, which automatically pings every cell phone in a disaster area, but significant cell-phone infrastructure was soon overloaded or destroyed during the disaster.
Even if people get orders to evacuate, not everyone will quickly follow through. McCaffrey, the U.S. Forest Service researcher, has studied people’s wildfire-evacuation preferences. She and her colleagues have found that in communities in South Carolina, Texas, and Washington State that have experienced wildfires, only one in four people is inclined to leave immediately upon receiving an official evacuation order; two-thirds favor a wait-and-see approach—it’s common, research finds, for people to scan outside for smoke or flames, or check with neighbors or other trusted sources—and roughly one in ten figures that he will stay and fight. Some homeowners, McCaffrey noted, simply feel that they can’t afford to lose their abodes. An intention to leave promptly may founder on last-minute complexities. What if an evacuation order comes when families are scattered at work and school? Does an elderly aunt have to be picked up along the way?
First responders in the C.Z.U. Fire knew about Paradise, and were able to avert a catastrophic loss of lives. Still, on the night the conflagration blew up in Santa Cruz County, they were caught off guard, and some orders were issued too late. “That fire was growing so rapidly, we didn’t know exactly where it was,” Nate Armstrong, who at the time of the disaster was a deputy chief in Cal Fire’s C.Z.U. unit, told me. Heavy smoke made it impossible to get fire-location intel from fire-mapping aircraft. Other factors—poor cell signals, overloaded telecommunications networks, power outages, burned infrastructure—created some alert-system failures. In the off-the-grid community of Last Chance, some people received reverse-911 landline calls after dark—but by then houses were aflame, and one man perished. Other residents, such as the Firebaughs, didn’t see or receive alerts disseminated via social media, CodeRed, or the Amber Alert system in time.
Amid the communications chaos, some people decided to clear out without waiting for word from the authorities. Meanwhile, roughly two dozen sheriff’s deputies started driving around, knocking on doors to tell people to get out; the cops moved systematically from north to south along the San Lorenzo Valley so as to avoid unleashing a simultaneous emptying of the entire area. (By the next day, two hundred officers were engaged in the effort.) Residents also consulted a new online map from a San Francisco-based tech startup called Zonehaven, which allowed the public to track evacuation warnings and orders in real time, without waiting for notifications. Zonehaven’s software is targeted primarily at fire, police, and emergency-services departments, which have traditionally used paper maps to decide on evacuation zones even as fires spread (a process that can take hours); its algorithm analyzes data on geography, population, and housing density, among other factors, and looks at traffic flow, to suggest pre-planned evacuation zones. In the C.Z.U. fire, its début, the Zonehaven platform provided the emergency agencies with what’s known as a common operating picture, helping them manage the evacuation of seventy-seven thousand people over five days. Some thirty counties in California now use Zonehaven, and it was deployed last year in thirty-seven wildfires.
Other new technology tools, such as sensors for detecting fires early, promise to optimize the emergency response and evacuation process further. And yet there are limits to how much a wildfire evacuation can be standardized or perfected. Aggressive, rapidly spreading conflagrations leave little margin for hesitation or error, and uncertainty on the ground is unavoidable. Every person’s evacuation experience is different. This summer, Jo Romaniello, a therapist who set up a Facebook page during the C.Z.U. fire where people could share their experiences, co-authored “The People Not the Fire: Stories of Resilience,” a book containing thirty diverse narratives of the disaster in Boulder Creek, a town in the northern San Lorenzo Valley. Although many people received alerts and had relatively orderly evacuations, some describe learning of the emergency from helicopters flying overhead, broadcasting orders to get out. Others, in areas that burned first, barely escaped the flames: one couple, finding their driveway blocked by fire, made it out in their cars at midnight with nothing but their dogs, the clothes they wore, a purse, and a violin. Romaniello and her husband weren’t registered for CodeRED, and never received a reverse-911 call; they heard about the danger when a friend called them. Unsure when to leave, they packed and evacuated late, at 2:30 A.M., after a deputy drove through their area with a bullhorn. By then, they could hear the roar of the fire. Nearby propane tanks were exploding, and the night sky was blazing red. They drove out into a blizzard of falling ash.
Knowing that Cal Fire was short-staffed and underequipped, a small cadre of people in the Santa Cruz mountains, some with firefighting experience, decided that their best bet was to stay and fight for their homes themselves. (A few had already evacuated with their spouses, children, and animals, but then chose to go back, alone, to their homes.) They used chainsaws, tractors, bulldozers, and other equipment to remove trees and understory, clearing fuel breaks around their property. On Westdale Drive, a private road with thirty-seven houses just south of the Firebaughs’ in Bonny Doon, seven households used makeshift water trucks and fire hoses to extinguish spot fires created by falling embers. The neighborhood later credited the crew with saving it: had the ignitions escalated, flames could have overrun many homes.
Inexperienced wildfire-fighting attempts by civilians can put them in grave danger, and first responders sometimes end up diverted from firefighting as they try to persuade residents to leave. Armstrong, from Cal Fire, told me that fire crews got several property owners out at the last minute, “with the fire right on their heels.” But Stasiewicz believes that people should be provided with guidance on surviving, as a last resort, in their homes or at refuge points, such as local baseball fields or store parking lots. Some ranching communities in the intermountain West have organized their own volunteer firefighting services, in coöperation with state and federal agencies that provide training and radios.
LizAnne Jensen, a former treasurer of the Fire Safe Council of Santa Cruz County, a nonprofit group that helps homeowners with wildfire protection, lives with her husband, Ken, on Westdale Drive, in a beige stucco house next to a studio where they craft and sell copper weathervanes. They have invested more than sixty thousand dollars in home-hardening and fuel-reduction improvements, going so far as to pay for work on neighboring property. On a bright summer day, LizAnne gave me a tour of their home. Wooden gates and fences, she said, can “carry fire right up to your house”; they’d replaced the timber gates leading to their back patio with ones made of polished corrugated steel. Their woodshed had been shielded with metal screen panels to keep out embers, and their doormats were made of metal grating. Their roof, which was covered in brown fire-resistant shingles and trimmed with green-painted metal flashing, was also rigged with sprinklers; a homemade misting system hidden under the eaves was capable of soaking the surrounding ground in minutes. Multiple fire hoses snaked across the small, parched meadow that separated their house and studio from the nearby woods, ready to draw from two tanks holding more than ten thousand gallons of water, or from their fourteen-thousand-gallon swimming pool.
As part of her work with the Fire Safe Council, LizAnne had helped draw up fire-readiness checklists. Whenever it’s red-flag-warning fire weather, she and her husband start working through a four-page series of tasks: agree on a meeting place if they get separated, secure the cats, charge and wear their walkie-talkies, move patio-furniture cushions indoors, sweep the roof and gutters, fuel the generator, and so on. The C.Z.U. fire, she said, had been their third evacuation in a dozen years. She had packed for thirteen hours, then left the house in her S.U.V. at 3:30 A.M. The Jensens hadn’t received an evacuation alert, but it was smoky, and burning embers were falling around them. Ken planned to follow, but first went to pick up an out-of-town neighbor’s cat and bird; at the last minute, he decided to hunker down at home, and teamed up with the other Westdale homeowners to defend their turf.
The Jensens continually thin out trees and understory around their homestead, and are re-landscaping their garden with low-lying, fire-resistant plants. “For homes to survive up here, this is kind of the new reality,” LizAnne told me. “It’s not for the faint of heart.” It’s a bittersweet paradox: on a warming planet, people who cherish a peaceful existence among trees must now keep them at bay. Still, as I looked around their property, I was struck by its beauty. The favoring of metal and concrete over wood imparted an industrial aesthetic, but the house wasn’t a utilitarian bunker. By one wall, a single soaring oak tree provided shade and comfort; it had been “limbed up”—its branches trimmed high above the ground. Perhaps this was a new Californian style.
It’s not enough for individual homeowners to step up their efforts. Making a single home fire-resistant may not be enough to save it if neighboring properties are in flames, because it can catch on fire from the radiant heat of surrounding blazes; as with vaccinations, a sort of herd immunity is necessary. Through a program run by the National Fire Protection Association, homeowners in several dozen Santa Cruz County neighborhoods have collaborated to get their communities recognized as “Firewise.” Bonny Doon has set up a handheld radio emergency-communications network; some neighbors have purchased satellite phones. Yet LizAnne worries that, next time, more homeowners may try to stay and defend without sufficient preparation. “Most people should evacuate, including us,” she said, looking across the meadow to where her husband was moving a garbage can. “Whether I can talk him into leaving or not is another thing.”
Late this summer, as the second anniversary of the C.Z.U. fire approached, I checked in with the Firebaughs. The blaze had reduced their house to a crumpled metal roof and brick chimney; a vista of charred tree skeletons dotted an ankle-deep layer of powdery gray ash. “You don’t really think that everything’s going to burn down,” Betsy said. Just clearing away house debris had taken five months.
Eventually, the Firebaughs learned that their house had been destroyed not by the main flame front of the wildfire but by the embers that floated a few miles ahead of it. Most homes that burn down in a wildfire are torched this way; that’s why defensible space is not enough, and a house must be hardened against embers, too. Their redwood deck had likely been an Achilles’ heel: it was easily ignited.
They intend to rebuild, and applied for building permits this July. Their new modernist residence will be constructed for wildfire, they told me, with steel framing, concrete siding, a metal roof with an under-the-eaves water-misting system, and a shaded concrete patio. The future of California architecture will be concrete and steel, Andrew told me. “Otherwise it’ll burn,” he said. They foresee spending the rest of their lives clearing away the dead, burned vegetation and managing new forest regrowth. If wildfire comes again, they believe that the house will defend itself; they’ll be more ready either to go or to stay.
Betsy told me that friends think they are crazy for rebuilding instead of moving into town. “We are in the middle of climate change,” she said. “My answer is, you’re kidding yourself if you don’t think everywhere in California is susceptible to fire.” More broadly, no place in California is free of natural hazards, and, if people move out of the so-called wildland-urban interface to avoid fires, they will face other perils. The Big One is overdue, and experts have long warned that a mega-deluge, created by a relentless month-long rainstorm, could transform the Central Valley into a temporary inland sea. (It has happened before, most recently in the eighteen-hundreds.) “Where should they live where they’re not at risk from another hazard?” McCaffrey, the U.S. Forest Service researcher, asked, of Californians.
It’s a question that applies to many people all around the world. If we could watch a time-lapse video of the earth since last summer, it would show us highways full of cars rushing away from raging wildfires in California, Oregon, Canada, Siberia, Turkey, Italy, Greece, Algeria, and Tunisia. It would capture Europeans retreating from floodwaters that are submerging their towns and cities. The dislocations would go on and on, with the most extensive in developing nations: in December, 2021, a “super typhoon” in the Philippines displaced nearly seven hundred thousand people, causing more than four hundred deaths. It can take weeks, months, or years for an evacuating household to return to their home—if they still have one.
California is in many ways just getting started on scaling up its adaptations for the wildland-fire threat. The state is investing $1.5 billion in wildfire-resilience projects, including home hardening and removing fuels along evacuation routes. The Biden Administration’s 2021 infrastructure bill provides a billion dollars in grants to help communities create and implement wildfire-protection plans, as well as another billion dollars in FEMA grants to support local disaster preparedness, including purchasing technology tools for evacuation warning and alerting, such as Zonehaven. In Santa Cruz, the county has hired a wildfire-resilience coördinator and hopes to strengthen its evacuation readiness with new funding grants. These investments reflect the discomfiting fact that in some parts of California, living for ten months of the year under the threat of possible evacuation is becoming a normalized reality.
In the urban neighborhood where I live, near Santa Cruz, there’s a small creek lined with untamed underbrush and highly flammable eucalyptus trees that make me nervous. Recently, I began organizing go bags for my household, which includes my elderly parents. (My sister and I are their primary caregivers.) In some ways, having more time to pack for a theoretical evacuation makes the task harder. If we had just ten minutes to flee a fire, it would be simple: grab the keys, wallets, cell phones, and medications, usher Mom and Dad into a vehicle, and go. It gets more complicated as you start thinking beyond that. There are more essentials: cash, clothes, laptop, identity and insurance papers, N95 masks for smoke and COVID, vaccination cards, my mother’s walker.
Other planning decisions take even more mulling over. If my sister and I evacuated in our two cars, would one of us take both parents, or would we split them up? If the latter, we’d have to pack their things in different bags, in case our cars get separated on the road. And how far would we need to go to be safe? Where would we stay? If we went to an emergency shelter, how would the crowded environment affect Dad, who has dementia? There are many interlocking choices to work through. I still haven’t finished packing the go bags, although I’ve filled a shoebox with old family letters and photos.
I can see why it’s impossible to craft a perfect evacuation plan for a wildfire. But walking through the preparedness checklists is illuminating. It forces you to role-play your way through adverse scenarios, and to ask what your priorities should be. Would you wait for an alert or clear out on your own? Would you drop everything to go pick up a neighbor’s cat or a friend’s mother? Would you go back to your house to try to save it? How well have you adjusted to the realization that you might have to get out at any time? Thinking these things through is now part of being Californian. These are the choices we live with in a fire season that never ends. ♦
