The World Needs to Start Planning for the Fire Age
Tens of thousands of people around the world have been evacuated this summer because of wildfires. Fires are burning in Portugal and Italy and Greece and Spain and France (and California and Alaska and Texas). And yet, when it comes to things like planning evacuations, best practices don’t really exist—there’s no book to consult, no checklist to follow.
The reason for this is that wildfire-evacuation research is still in its infancy. “Wildfires only started to emerge as a major disaster in recent years,” Xilei Zhao, a professor in the University of Florida’s Department of Civil and Coastal Engineering, wrote to me over email. Even so, fire experts told me, there’s enough of an understanding now to start creating a playbook, one that could save lives.
“We spent a hundred years developing codes
