Fire evacuation protocols are often created with cars in mind: Make sure your gas tank is always at least half-full, know how to open your garage if the power goes out, keep a go-bag in your vehicle.
“It’s the assumption that everyone’s got a car and some sort of transportation out,” says Boulder Office of Disaster Management (ODM) Director Mike Chard. “And that’s just not the case.”
More than 7,800 households in Boulder County don’t have access to a car, according to 2022 census data. In case of a wildfire evacuation, the going advice for those folks is: Plan to ride with a neighbor.
Meanwhile, Boulder’s transportation goals envision fewer cars on the road. The City’s Transportation Master Plan aims to cut transportation-related greenhouse gas emissions in half and have 80% of all trips for residents be walking, biking or transit, with the same percentage of all residents living in walkable neighborhoods by 2030.
So what happens as there are fewer car-owning neighbors to ride with?
It’s still an “emerging space,” says Chard, but County and City officials are working to roll out a pedestrian preparedness plan in the first few months of 2024. ODM, which serves the City of Boulder and unincorporated Boulder County, is bringing together different groups, including first responders from across the county and transportation specialists, in hopes of answering questions about how to plan for pedestrian safety during disasters.
Part of that plan will be resources to help those without cars prepare — how to find walkways and bike paths out of a fire, how to move in relation to the fire (90 degrees from direction of the wind), and so on. Another part of that planning will involve evacuation.
“Evacuations are very resource intensive to begin with,” Chard says. “You have only so many cops, but you gotta go door to door, then you also gotta do traffic control points. And now we gotta start getting assessments for how we do pedestrian management, and how do we get transportation resources in there? And what’s the timeline to do that?
“The reality of it is there will be a period of time where this thing is evolving that people have to be responsible for their personal safety.”
‘Living with risk’
Much of Boulder County exists in a wildland urban interface (WUI), a zone where human development mixes with wildland like undeveloped grassland, brush or forest that can be fuel for a fire. More than 60,000 communities in the U.S. are at risk of WUI fires, and the total WUI area grows by about 2 million acres each year, according to the U.S. Fire Administration.
Like many WUI communities, the county’s fire-related risk is increasing. Wildfire damage in the county is projected to increase by 50% between 2020 and 2050, according to a 2018 study.
Planning for wildfire evacuations is generally tricky. Unlike with other natural disasters like hurricanes, they spark unexpectedly and can happen anywhere, complicating evacuation routes and planning. Fire is also riskier for pedestrians — flood warnings don’t require a car, just climbing to higher ground, and hail and tornadoes usually come with shelter-in-place orders.
“This is part of living with risk,” Chard says. “It’s important that people understand that by not having the vehicle, then you have to be aware of what risks you have around you.”
That’s why preparation is so important. Community members should ensure they’re signed up for alerts, plan with neighbors, have a small go-bag prepared that can be carried on foot, know multiple routes out of their neighborhood and get moving early — without being prompted — if they feel like there’s a risk.
“The risk isn’t: Everyone’s going to die because they don’t have a car,” Chard says. “The risk is knowing what to do when you’re faced with this hazard and when the evacuation comes in, taking timely action, not waiting. Moving away from the threat area and getting just four or five blocks — not miles — away is gonna make a huge difference in someone’s threat to their life.”
Of course, there are many folks for whom not having a car is not a choice, and “getting moving” could be difficult.
Until recently, Chard says much of the effort and many transit resources have been centered on residents with mobility challenges (read more about those efforts here). Law enforcement officials often help with notifying and evacuating people who are unhoused.
“We’re trying to hit those areas, too — vulnerable populations in the community, expanding our relationships with the human services organizations in the county, our community connectors, around translation and all these other issues.”
‘Be creative’
There are still a lot of questions ODM is working to answer: Where could people on foot be collected? How should transportation resources be brought into evacuation points? What resources can and should be leveraged?
“By increasing the number of people that don’t have a car or some sort of transportation, that just compounds the issue more but that’s why we’re bringing people together, because we’re seeing the shift and communities change all the time,” Chard says, adding that density and congestion are other changes his team is working to address.
During the Marshall Fire, Chard says heroic acts and “strangers helping strangers” helped to get people to safety. Delivery drivers put people in their trucks. Sheriff’s deputies evacuated Costco shoppers and a woman whose husband was at work with the household’s only car, 9News reported.
Although a more robust pedestrian plan is in the works, Chard says that type of golden rule-thinking will remain important.
“There’s also going to be a need for a lot of community concern for one another,” he says. “That second layer of community preparedness is trying to make sure that those plans, relationships, notifications are happening. That also helps cut down the number of people that are going to need help. And as you can imagine, there’s only so many resources.” (Mutual aid efforts to preparedness are already in the works — read about some of them here)
For Alexander Maranghides, a WUI researcher at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, community care is an important tool in emergency preparedness. Social tools (like riding with neighbors or working from home on red flag days to reduce trips to gather family members) and community tools (perhaps an early evacuation sign-up system that utilizes an evacuation team) are both important in a multi-layered approach to preparedness.
It’s not clear that any community has a robust, community-level plan for pedestrian evacuations, but responses in previous fires can provide clues to the possibilities.
One tool Maranghides lauds as particularly helpful, especially during “no-notice” events where the fire starts so quickly and so close to a community that full evacuation isn’t possible, are temporary fire refuge areas (TRAs) — typically large open areas like parking lots, gravel areas or soccer fields.
Those areas should be pre-planned, well-marked and numerous, so that they’re easily accessible throughout the community — to those with and without vehicles, Maranghides says.
TRAs were used during the devastating 2018 Camp Fire in California, which Maranghides has studied extensively, and regional buses came to evacuate those in the refuge areas who didn’t have vehicles.
Civilians and first responders utilize a temporary refuge area during the Camp Fire. Credit: Technical Discussion 041 from NIST Report
Chard also sees the potential of setting up “rally points.”
“Then we’re able to move the mass transit transportation resources that we have through our transportation emergency support function, which has the relationships with CU and other resources that can then move to that site, load people up, move them out, and get into shelters,” he says.
RTD is among the transportation resources ODM has been in touch with, Chard says, though RTD is most likely to be used in a mutual aid environment rather than in immediate response, and ODM doesn’t have the authority to tell RTD or other transportation entities how they must help during an evacuation.
“Via, RTD, any kind of those supporting resources, they would make the decision,” says Monika Weber, ODM’s disaster management coordinator.
It’s also important to consider when and where buses run — whether they run at night, where they’re parked when they’re not running, and so on, Maranghides says.
“We need to think not just daytime, we need to think nighttime, we need to think potential power outages, communication outages,” he says. “We have to push the envelope in terms of laying out these events because we know that these things can happen.”
Every community is different — there’s no one-size-fits-all approach, and successful preparedness requires community conversations at the local level and leveraging existing infrastructure, Maranghides says.
“The goal is not always to have the best of everything, particularly in existing communities,” he says. “But we want to use all the tools and be creative to help us get as prepared as we can to limit the number of people that have to be truly rescued.”
This story was produced as part of our After the Fire series examining how Boulder County is preparing for the next disaster two years after the Marshall Fire. Read the other stories:
‘Helping themselves’ For marginalized communities, mutual aid is the model for emergency preparedness by Cindy Torres
‘Find a way’ Through fire and flood and dark of night, Via delivers safe transport — for free by Shay Castle
Rebuilding by the numbers Who’s home, who’s not — and why by Will Matuska
Photo gallery by local filmmaker and photographer Megan Sweeney
