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Forced Out by Deadly Fires, Then Trapped in Traffic
- wglb 8y agoThis is the key quote: “I don’t know that you could build the infrastructure to evacuate an entire town that quickly,” I don't feel like this is thought through, not for the wildfires, not for the hurricanes. How do you move 100,000 people out? A little paper exercise should suggest the scale of this problem, and how unprepared everyone is.
- petermcneeley 8y agoPripyat (53k people) was evacuated by the USSR by bus in only a few hours. If you cant compete with an inefficient communist country from the 80s you probably should reexamine the structure of your society.
- Piskvorrr 8y agoWhere the nature of the emergency (Chernobyl nuclear fallout) did not block any of the escape routes.
- llukas 8y agoUsing cars to evacuate blocks pretty much every escape route.
- Piskvorrr 8y agoWhich also tells you something...if there were as many cars in Pripyat, the situation would have been similar. In other words, the two emergency situations differ in most aspects. But yeah, buses scale far better than individual cars, that's for sure. (Oh, and btw, given the long-running tinfoil campaigns against federal agencies in general and emergency response in particular, I can totally see how "This is FEMA, everyone get onto our buses, we'll take you somewhere safe" would prompt an orderly evacuation. Not.)
- llukas 8y agoIf there were as many cars in Pripyat and evacuation was done US-style then yes. Except it wasn't done US-style: http://chernobylplace.com/chernobyl-evacuation/ http://chernobylplace.com/chernobyl-evacuation/
- twblalock 8y agoEvery source I've found says that the government delayed the evacuation by more than a day before sending in the buses. Once the buses had arrived, it took several hours to evacuate.
- segmondy 8y agoThat's the key, bus. You can batch the task. In US you have 1 or 2 people per car.
- jcranmer 8y agoThe interstate highways were partially designed to be able to evacuate large cities in the case of a nuclear attack. As anyone who has traveled on such roads during rush hour can well attest, their ability to do so is quite lacking. In modern times, the one major natural disaster we have that can be reasonably well predicted ahead of time to afford lengthy evacuation times is a major hurricane. We discovered during Hurricane Ike, however, that even a large city with ample lead time and comprehensive evacuation planning (including lane reversal plans to maximize egress capacity) cannot be adequately evacuated for a hurricane. What can be gleaned from the more mundane task of trying to move commuters into and out of cities is that, if your goal is to move people, then the first thing you should do is take them out of their cars. A highway lane has a fixed capacity of about 2,000 vehicles per hour, independent of if those vehicles are carrying 1 person or 100 people.
- anticensor 8y agoWhy are cities not planned such that evacuation routes are already commonly used routes in the morning peak? If you plan city that way, all roads will saturate equally instead of all traffic stuffing on highways and arterials, in non-evacuation scenarios. EDIT: descendant merged
- nordsieck 8y ago> Why are cities not planned such that evacuation routes are already commonly used routes in the morning peak? No one wants to pay for that level of capacity.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- dsfyu404ed 8y agoThis. People would rather have "rush hour" be from 3-8pm rather than pay for enough spare capacity that peak demand only saturates the system from 5-6. If a four lane highway is saturated for 3hr you'd need twelve lanes to cut that time to 1hr. That's a lot of money.
- SlowRobotAhead 8y ago>How do you move 100,000 people out? Quickly? You don’t. It’s a function of people and time, short time, small number of people. Think about your daily drive. If you aren’t the first car at every single stop light, you likely getting out if 100,000 other people want to as well. I find it a tad frustrating that people don’t think about these things until they are happening, but life isn’t assured, your government might not always be coming to help, you are responsible for your own safety.
- dsfyu404ed 8y ago>I find it a tad frustrating that people don’t think about these things until they are happening, but life isn’t assured, your government might not always be coming to help, you are responsible for your own safety. The second part of your sentence is the cause of the first. The idea that there exists a situation where one could be literally on your own with no authority figure to help you is an ideological non-starter to a lot of people. It's just wholly incompatible with everything they believe so any discussion about how to prepare for that possibility won't happen.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- notatcomputer68 8y agoWhat about bikes?
- komali2 8y agoWe got trapped in Houston during Rita. Then we bought motorcycles and it never happened again.
- dredmorbius 8y agoDeals poorly with walls of fire and choking smoke. Or elderly, disabled, infants, children, pets, ...
- Filligree 8y agoNo single solution works for everything. If most people get out on bicycles, then there's more space for the ones that have to use cars.
- photojosh 8y agoYou get the same objection to everyday bike commuting; what about those who can't? Well, they can stay in cars, but if even a small percentage of able-bodied adults got on a bike instead, then that's your problem solved.
- dredmorbius 8y agoThere are circumstances for which I'd suggest a bike is a reasonable mobility tool. Say, after a major earthquake, where immediate hazards are few, fuel supplies are limited, mobility options few, and when the ability to pick up the bike or wheel it through areas where the roadbed is badly damaged or littered with debris would be a strong plus for a bicycle. Having done quite a bit of cycling myself (multiple century and double-century rides -- miles, periods of 200-300+ mile weeks regulary, a 30+ mile round-trip commute, extensive tours), personal experience with much of the regions burnt by recent wildfires (I'd visited a friend in Chico fall of 2015, and drove out via the next highway north of Paradise, CA-32 to Lassen), with its mountainous terrain and very close-in forests (I was struck by how dry the region was three years ago, and was concerned at the time of what I'd do if a fire were to start), and been relatively close to smaller (though still multi-acre) wildfires, and watched footage of the Paradise evacuation, I would not want to rely on a bike to get me away from one under the circumstances prevailing for Paradise. The timeline of the fire, warnings, alerts, and evacuation were short. The fire was massive and intense. Flames were immediately adjacent to if not on the roadbed. One of the factors disabling vehicles were tires exploding from heat. And the primary road out (Skyway) is not a constant descent -- there are up-and-down sections. Cycling through that would simply be insane. Flat terrain, a constant descent, ample warning: possibly. Conditions of Paradise in November 2018: not a chance in the hell that it was.
- brm 8y agoJams happen most often because people operate cars with incomplete information about the cars around them and inability to operate their cars optimally. As self driving cars advance and become networked the idea is that they could perform a lift like this while communicating with one another. That said, this is a possibility but not a proper solution. Public transit is perhaps also a possibility but not a solution. The real solution though seems much less palatable. Only a few disasters require the mass evacuation of people and perhaps its simply better to keep our cities and populations from the edges of fire prone lands and draw back our cities and people from the immediate coastal paths of hurricanes.
- winningcontinue 8y agodefinitely possible. Not at all practical, except in the event of a quick mass evacuation like this.
- gpm 8y agoMy instinct is to say buses, and don't wait too long. Let's do some math: Edit: Corrected math. Thanks! You can easily fit 20 people/bus. So that's 5,000 bus rides. 2000 busses/hour/lane is a reasonable estimate. They had a 4 lane road, 2 lanes in each direction, so 4000 buses per hour. Divide capacity by 2 to account for inefficiency and round up to get to 3 hours That's a lot of busses, but not an unreasonable number. To hit those numbers you have to be forcing people to evacuate by bus. If they try and take a car you need to stop them before they jam up the road. American's aren't going to take that easily. Of course you can encourage them to evacuate by car before you start the mandatory by bus evacuation. It's not like forest fires come with 0 warning.
- llukas 8y agoShouldn't it be 5000 bus rides? 100000/20 = 5000 so <3h and you're done assuming you got enough buses.
- gpm 8y agoYes... oops. I thought those numbers seemed high.
- mrnobody_67 8y agoTypical bus holds 50 people
- AngusH 8y agoExcellent to have some calculated numbers! Two thoughts: 1) Possibly the road could be rearranged to allow travel only in one direction, freeing up at least 1 extra lane? 2) It might be possible to get some of the bigger 50 or 80 capacity transit buses, or some large school buses? One article I found suggested California had in excess of 20,000 school buses, although I'm still looking for a reliable source to back that up.
- gpm 8y ago1) Possible, but you've got significant traffic in both directions. You need to get bus's in as well as out. 2) Absolutely. And really you could probably stuff 80 people into your a bus in an emergency. But you're going to have a real problem organizing people onto buses so I worry that in reality you'd be running many well below peak capacity.
- flukus 8y ago100,000 people shouldn't be too hard, we move that many people into and back out of football stadiums regularly and inside a matter of hours. If it isn't being done then it's because it hasn't been planned and/or paid for, not because it's a scale we can't deal with.
- nradov 8y agoIt's relatively easy to quickly move 100K people in a city of 10M. But it's impossible to quickly move 100K in a city of 100K. It's all about proportions. There's not enough transportation infrastructure anywhere to get 100% of the population out.
- rapjr9 8y agoIn the US, building of new roads has not kept up with population increases (in part because there's no place to put new roads). Even the smallest towns tend to have delays and grid lock at rush hour, and that's only part of the population. The speed of the fires also requires a greater evacuation speed. A bicycle would probably be faster than a car given the capacity of the roads.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- sjg007 8y agoI think the long term answer here is to either not rebuild or mandate that the houses be built to a wildfire proof standard. Stucco, tile, ember and flame proof soffits etc... and maybe fire shutters and doors.
- tiredwired 8y agoThey need fireproof storm shelters like the tornado shelters in areas prone to those.
- maxxxxx 8y agoI think that's pretty difficult. During the firebombings in WW2 people asphyxiated in the shelters.
- aidenn0 8y agoIt's very doable. If you have a masonry building with no plants within 20 feet, you're pretty safe
- dsfyu404ed 8y agoMasonry is a non-starter in CA because "muh earthquakes". Rebar is a thing but politics has no time for technicalities like that.
- aidenn0 8y agoThere are plenty of standards for earthquake proof masonry in CA. AAC is not allowed, mainly because nobody has done the work to certify
- dsfyu404ed 8y agoTechnicalities like that get lost in the noise when the political poo flinging over who's gonna pay and where it'll be located starts. An idea can't just be correct. It needs to be correct and marketable to people who don't really care.
- PuffinBlue 8y agoFor first hand accounts and excellent reporting on the Camp fire take a look at the Blancolirio channel on YouTube. Juan Brown does some great work and has some very interesting content, such as exclusive access to the VLAT refueling and refilling operation, a 50+ minute interview with one of the nurses that helped evacuate the hospital, and he lives just 40 miles from the fire, so lived it's effects. He also has some truly brilliant content on the Oroville Dam, the near disaster and the subsequent multi year rebuild project. https://www.youtube.com/user/blancolirio https://www.youtube.com/user/blancolirio
- zawerf 8y agoThere was a firsthand video where a guy came back after the fire was over to find his neighbors as a bunch of skeletons inside their burnt cars. "I went to their house right here in this white car to get them out. She had to put her makeup on. She died because of it." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rmu2-P18Is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rmu2-P18Is
- danso 8y agoI'd wager that most of the people who managed to die in this fire were doing things that seem inexplicably superficial in their final moments.
- arcticfox 8y ago"managed to die"? That's pretty harsh, from what I've seen of it.
- danso 8y agoI don't blame them -- I've never been in a wildfire or imminent disaster situation, but my impression is that the majority of the people who've died in the fire didn't die because they were completely ignorant of the fire until it was suddenly upon them. They are aware of the warnings, but don't believe until it's too late that they are in imminent danger. So I don't think the victims as being particularly irrational, just particularly unlucky. I've watched this video, and I've seen it shared frequently with people highlighting exclusively the "dumb" woman and her makeup, as if that seemingly superficial decision by her was the thing that led to her tragic death. There were others who died at that gate in the fire, and they all made decisions just as superficial as wanting to put on makeup beforehand -- I mean, in the way that every delaying decision is incredibly superficial when we consider it in retrospect.
- psynch 8y agoI was in Paradise the morning of the fire. Does anyone have any questions?
- Diederich 8y agoHave you lived there? I heard that the town had done some sort of evacuation practice after a big fire in ...2008 I believe? How did the previous practice inform the evacuation this time?
- psynch 8y agoYes, I've lived in Paradise many years and was in town for the 2008 fire. I heard that since the 2008 fire the town debated making bigger roads but instead decided on breaking the town into zones and evacuating by zone. This fire was very unusual in that within a couple of hours it seemed to have spread to many location across town. At my location by 745am (the fire begin 10 miles from town at 630am) there were many bits of burnt bark and leaves raining down all around. Many of these were likely falling in different locations as embers. The town is in an area of frequent fires, it's not uncommon to have nearby fires, they generally move in the order of a day so a zoned evacuation in many normal cases could work. I've never seen a fire that moved this quickly.
- Diederich 8y agoThanks for your assessment. > I've never seen a fire that moved this quickly. I've been hearing a lot of this of late.
- HillaryBriss 8y agohow did you evacuate? did you take one car by yourself or share a ride with others?
- psynch 8y agoThat morning I had gotten up somewhat early to do some work, around 745 the light outside was redder than it should be. Going outside I found smoke high in the air and large bits of burnt material falling. An online fire map showed a small fire had started 10 miles north east of town. The weather map showed a 17mph wind headed south west. Out of caution we started packing a few things just in case we get an evacuation notice. However, after 30 minutes or so listening to an online emergency radio scanner and searching social media it became clear we needed to leave. Within an hour we had our 4runner packed and around 9am we were heading out, the sky had now turned dark like night and we encountered normal traffic. We stopped at our office to grab a flat of water, while there got a robocall (landline) notification to evacuate. We headed out of town and just a mile down the road (south middle of town) we saw a large patch of fire burning a few hundred feet from the road. Paradise has essentially 3 roads out, two of them are two lane roads. Often when there's a fire at least one or two can be blocked by fire. We evacuated by car, one car, we could have taken two but decided to stick together in one. Five of us.
- curtis 8y agoI know people on Hacker News have no love for multi-level concrete parking garages, but it seems to me that such structures could easily be engineered to withstand the effects of a fire like this one. This way residents could shelter in place, or at least shelter "nearby", in the event of similar massive, fast-moving fires. If you built structures like this in most every neighborhood, well, I guess they'd be big eyesores, but then, on the other hand, you could get rid of a bunch of on street parking.
- ui-explorer12 8y agoif you think a giant concrete parking structure would (a) work to shelter in place in the face of a giant, wind-powered fire or (b) be appropriate in a northern California locale like paradise you are more out of touch than the president telling us we need to "rake the forest floor". I don't want to come down too hard on someone proposing an idea in good faith, but you need to dramatically re-align your perspective to truly understand the scale and scope of this problem. We can't use simple buildings to mitigate this; it's not a minor change to forest practices. It is a fundamental convergence of decades-old policies, millions of people living in the forest interface and global climatic changes.
- curtis 8y ago> ... you are more out of touch than the president telling us we need to "rake the forest floor". I don't want to come down too hard on someone proposing an idea in good faith, ... I think this is a terrible response. If you want to disagree with me I think you can do it without being a jerk.
- ummonk 8y agoI would think survivable shelters should not be too hard to build if you also place oxygen tanks with breathing masks there as well. After all some properties already have swimming pools, which together with breathing masks should do the trick.
- onetimemanytime 8y agoshelters might do well in brushfires. Not sure how they do when huge trees are on fire. Long term solution: don't build there. Even evacuations don't work: nah, my house is too far...I'll leave in a bit...let me just get a few more things etc etc.
- gizmo686 8y agoI imagine underground shelters would be workable. Heat tends to rise, and ground seems like a good insulator. You would still probably need to get rid of most air circulation with the outside, and come up with some plan for safely exiting.
- mirimir 8y agoIndeed. I get that those forest developments are beautiful. But living in mediterranean-type climate areas is foolish. The more effectively you suppress fire, the worse it will be, when it happens.
- softgrow 8y agoAustralian here. Australia has different wild/bushfires in that the morning is always safe (at least as far as we know for the last 100 years) and easy to evacuate, the danger is in the afternoon. So there is a simple strategy that will always work, let's call it the "Westfield" strategy. If there is elevated risk, grab your irreplaceable and head to your nearest Westfield shopping centre for lunch in the food court. Then see a movie. Then attempt to go home. If your house didn't burn down then I hope you enjoyed your day out. If it did you are still alive. The problem though with this strategy is that chances are, and indeed amply demonstrated by the Victorian 2009 bushfires is that a large number of homes were threatened but only a very small proportion of towns and homes under threat were actually destroyed. Australia being inhabited by happy go-lucky gambler types brings out the worst in us, so people will chance it. (and add to that those without insurance who will stay to protect their asset as they are in a bind) As to the US, no-one has ever died in traffic save for one single example I found in one canyon fire in California where a police cruiser assisting with evacuations crashed into a tree and blocked the road [You should expect once one person crashes, the next person will crash into them due to poor visibility] and the other end of the road was blocked by the fire and I think some roadworks, I'd need to look it up. That aside evacuation is much safer than "stay in place" particularly as the latter requires a great deal of mental fortitude to remain focussed in dense smoke and loud noise [people fail to do simple things and die], little own having a structure that will provide survivable conditions. Roads can move a huge number of people even in cars. The only exception to this is to my understanding, again in California where there is a valley with a freeway through it but too many residences and I think limited capacity getting on to the freeway to evacuate everyone quickly. Takeaway - evacuate early, nobody ever died from evacuating needlessly. Remember its just "stuff", possessions are not worth risking your life.
- davidgay 8y ago> As to the US, no-one has ever died in traffic save for one single example I found in one canyon fire in California where a police cruiser assisting with evacuations crashed into a tree and blocked the road http://articles.latimes.com/1991-10-23/news/mn-174_1_fire-victims http://articles.latimes.com/1991-10-23/news/mn-174_1_fire-vi...
- scarejunba 8y agoInteresting. When New Orleans or Texas flooded we heard about how we shouldn’t build in places prone to natural disasters. Much less of that talk here about building in the forest.
- axilmar 8y agoSame thing happened in Greece recently...The roads were so narrow that people were burned alive...