WEBVTT
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Hello everybody, welcome to the Fire Science Show.
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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.
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Fires are, on the one hand, rare, so they don't give you that many opportunities to learn, and they're often big tragedies.
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So, yeah, we really do not want those losses or casualties.
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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.
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In 2018, there was a massive wildfire in California.
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It was named Camp Fire, and NIST pursued a big research project and big investigation into this fire.
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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.
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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?
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What could have been better, what actually saved some lives.
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So we have not only bad things but also good insights and one thing that I really really like from this episode.
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I will not tell you about the fire itself.
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Eric will tell you in the interview.
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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.
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And what I really appreciate in this project is that it recognizes that stuff may not go as planned and prepares for that.
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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.
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So, escape Project a very interesting conversation on lessons learned from the campfire with Eric Link from NIST.
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Let's spin the intro and jump into the episode.
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Welcome to the Firesize Show.
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My name is Wojciech Wigrzyński and I will be your host.
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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.
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com.
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And now back to the episode.
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Hello everybody, I am joined today by Eric D Link from NIST.
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Hey, eric, good to have you in the podcast.
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Great to be here.
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Thank you, very welcome.
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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.
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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.
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So perhaps let's start with introducing the project itself, like how did it start and what was your initial goal?
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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.
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So let's start with the beginning sure?
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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.
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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.
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I guess the name came before the chat, but I mean people make acronyms out of anything today with the chatbot.
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But I see it's extremely impressive when someone did that before the chatbot era, so congratulations.
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It's a lovely acronym.
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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.
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So, wow, all of this work and came up with that acronym on his own, I believe.
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Wow, congratulations, alex, for the acronym and for the project as well.
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So what was the initial idea and how it came to life?
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So it really came to life when we embarked on a long-term case study of the Camp Fire incident in 2018.
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That fire very quickly spread into multiple towns, namely Paradise, california.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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These types of events seem to be happening more frequently and we'd love to be more prepared in a community sense for evacuations.
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What's the geography of the Paradise area?
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Is it like mountainous?
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Is it like flat at the beach, at the ocean?
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California is a big state as far as I know.
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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.
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Was there?
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anything super special about that fire.
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I mean, it's horrible to say, but we seem to have like the worst fires every few years.
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Like I think out of worst fires in 20th century, 19 or 18 of them happened in like last few years.
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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.
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So those were contributing factors, as you mentioned.
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Of course we've had comparable disasters in the years since it's kind of horrible, isn't it?
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It's like yeah.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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Sure, so a few things, one just the size of the fire and the geography of the area.
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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.
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This was about six o'clock in the morning, so a bit early for people to be awake.
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Can you narrow down, like when the fire initiated and when it reached the community?
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Are we talking about hours or we're talking less than one hour?
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Less than one hour?
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Oh, okay, less than one hour and a kilometer away, or?
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more.
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Okay, okay, okay, okay, yeah.
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So that was a community next to the Paradise Kankau.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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It must have been some time.
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So was there a call for like a complete evacuation of the Paradise community?
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I mean, you said 30,000 people down, so it's not a small group of people to evacuate.
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I assume it's a morning so it's also perhaps not optimal to reach everyone.
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Was it a working day?
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People were going to their work and had to come back home to pick stuff.
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It was a working day.
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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.
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Wow, that is blowing my mind.
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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.
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Yeah, so.
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Wow, I had no intimate knowledge about that fire and as you described it.
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So wow, it blows my mind.
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I'm used to building fires.
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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.
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And you're speaking about and you're speaking about communities and cities, somehow.
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Absolutely so.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Not everybody is going to get out very easily in that scenario.
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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.
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We see this case and other cases since then where it's just not possible.
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The fire ignites too closely, it spreads too quickly, there's too many people in these areas.
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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.
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And the temporary refuge area is this ad hoc emergency use sort of small clearing area with reduced fuel.
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It could be a parking lot the middle of a roadway intersection.
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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.
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So sort of they're the best location at the time with reduced exposure.
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So sort of they're the best location at the time with reduced exposure.
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And at least 1,200 people from our case study we identified having used these temporary refuge areas so that they could survive.
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I know that the temporary fire refuge areas are a big outcome of the project.
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We will definitely come back to them with more details.
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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.
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It's actually meant to serve as a refuge area.
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You mentioned that the Paradise City had some sort of evacuation plan.
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What kind of goes into plan like that plan?
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What kind of goes into plan like that?
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What kind of procedure does it involve and how compromised it gets when the fire spreads so rapidly?
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Yeah, so of course there's no standardized evacuation plan, so it gets a bit complicated to compare community to community.
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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.
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What evacuation routes exist?
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What are the hazards along those routes that need to be kept in mind?
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Could some of them be affected by fire spread?
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And if they are, what's the plan?
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That's actually a big one, but it kind of comes in the hindsight right.
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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?
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Was it already part of the original plan, or is it something that we learned from the disaster?
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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.
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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.
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So using history to guide our future planning might not work anymore.
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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.
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Do you?
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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.
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Yeah.
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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.
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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.
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But it might not just be one of these bad events that happens.
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Typically in these catastrophic things, it's multiple contributing factors.
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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.
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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.
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I think we do not appreciate the amount of stress over the people who take um decisions.
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That's why procedures are in place.
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Like in the situation of high stress, the decision making is compromised.
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Therefore, relying on procedure is perhaps your safest bet, because you simply execute something and you don't, you know think.
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It's my own interpretation and it comes from my experience in training.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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And that includes the reaction plan, the communication plan.
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Who needs to be involved?
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Who needs to know these things before an event?
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Who's going to help you out?
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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.
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It's a big network that needs to be involved.
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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?
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Was there even a capacity that could actually handle those tens of thousands of people?
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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?
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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.
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And did you post-fire analyze that?
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Was there even a chance that they could all evacuate safely by vehicles?
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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.
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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.
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So I wonder if this traffic jam is an inherent piece of dire evacuation.
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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.
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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.
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Now we know that's very complex.
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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.
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How long will it you require to evacuate your community?
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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.
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It is what it is.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Sometimes they would say, oh, you don't need this road in this community because there's only like 500 people.
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We need a third road somewhere else.
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But sometimes this one road could actually be the event that you need to offload a big piece of community in case of evacuation.
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I am not sure if such considerations are today a part of designing communities.
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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.
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But as well, I think you say you see this all the time.
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I see it all the time in the news.
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I guess that's the future.
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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.
00:24:54.862 --> 00:25:03.778
I think that that's one very interesting outcome of investigating that you need to be pretty well prepared beforehand.
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Really A lot of lessons from campfires.
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Tell me how this was translated into actionable guidance of the ESCAPE project.
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How did the work in between look like?
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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.
00:25:34.667 --> 00:25:35.829
How many were there?
00:25:36.672 --> 00:25:39.175
What was the traffic conditions through the town?
00:25:40.017 --> 00:25:51.435
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.
00:25:51.517 --> 00:26:03.346
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.
00:26:03.346 --> 00:26:29.136
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.
00:26:29.136 --> 00:27:00.414
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.
00:27:01.565 --> 00:27:02.727
What are you protecting against?
00:27:02.727 --> 00:27:04.069
Radiation?
00:27:04.069 --> 00:27:06.996
Firebrands, smoke, low oxygen content.
00:27:06.996 --> 00:27:07.958
What's the hazard?
00:27:07.998 --> 00:27:13.536
really the hazard immediately would be radiation and direct flames.
00:27:13.536 --> 00:27:26.816
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.
00:27:27.285 --> 00:27:34.673
And they're sitting in a very good fuel loaded vehicle, yeah, with plastics and everything Right, very combustible Of course.
00:27:35.375 --> 00:27:56.517
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.
00:27:56.597 --> 00:28:00.200
I guess that would be awesome, but it's not required, right?
00:28:00.200 --> 00:28:05.163
It's more about providing sufficient space and distance from the hazard, I assume.
00:28:06.525 --> 00:28:06.905
Yeah, that's correct.
00:28:06.905 --> 00:28:15.292
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.
00:28:15.795 --> 00:28:15.994
Okay.
00:28:16.827 --> 00:28:17.892
We can talk about that again.
00:28:17.892 --> 00:28:23.626
Shelter we can talk about that again.
00:28:23.626 --> 00:28:24.189
First, the immediate action.
00:28:24.189 --> 00:28:49.907
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.
00:28:49.907 --> 00:29:00.117
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.
00:29:00.765 --> 00:29:10.829
And we've transitioned the terminology here from a temporary refuge area to a temporary fire refuge area to distinguish that.
00:29:10.829 --> 00:29:19.828
There's two concepts here, the first being the ad hoc use and the second being the pre-planned intentional identification of these areas.
00:29:19.828 --> 00:29:23.352
And the name that we came up with there is very intentional.
00:29:23.352 --> 00:29:28.596
It's temporary and the fact that it is you will have to leave there eventually.
00:29:28.596 --> 00:29:33.020
It may only provide a safer place for a short period of time.
00:29:41.444 --> 00:29:45.855
Fire, because it's related to fire specifically, we could consider other refuge areas for other incidents that may not be appropriate in fire.
00:29:45.855 --> 00:29:56.027
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.
00:29:56.027 --> 00:29:58.834
So a little bit of distinction to be made there.
00:29:58.834 --> 00:30:10.711
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.
00:30:10.711 --> 00:30:17.509
But these areas are not up to the same stringent definition of safety.
00:30:17.509 --> 00:30:30.397
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.
00:30:30.397 --> 00:30:32.932
So it's not the first choice.
00:30:32.932 --> 00:30:36.855
The first choice, hopefully, would always be to evacuate.
00:30:37.727 --> 00:30:46.491
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.
00:30:46.491 --> 00:30:50.813
It's more like I'm evacuating, I reach a point where I cannot move anymore.
00:30:50.813 --> 00:30:55.070
I seek the closest temporary fire refuge area at this point as a backup.
00:30:55.070 --> 00:30:57.440
That is our approach yes.
00:30:57.440 --> 00:31:09.465
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?
00:31:10.166 --> 00:31:17.787
So ideally they would be clear of fuel, whether it's vegetative or community fuel, it could be managed fuel.
00:31:17.787 --> 00:31:32.445
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.
00:31:32.445 --> 00:31:50.486
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.
00:31:50.486 --> 00:31:55.451
That would be a safer distance from any flame exposure.
00:31:55.451 --> 00:32:03.641
Ultimately, what it will not do is prevent embers or prevent smoke hazards.
00:32:04.121 --> 00:32:10.096
So, as we think about implementing this in an engineering sense or community practice.
00:32:10.096 --> 00:32:29.459
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.
00:32:29.986 --> 00:32:33.373
Well, that requires maintenance and supply and everything.
