Escaping Hurricane Ian

This week, Ian slammed into southwestern Florida as a Category 4 (almost 5) hurricane. The state is still very much in the process of assessing the damage: Emergency teams have rescued hundreds of stranded people, while some 1.9 million people remain without power. Officials have identified as many as 21 dead, and that number may still rise.

Ahead of the storm’s landfall, Florida officials ordered the evacuation of about 2.5 million people. Xilei Zhao, an evacuations researcher, was not one of them. Zhao lives farther north, in Gainesville, which ended up being spared the storm’s worst. There, in her role as a professor in the Department of Civil and Coastal Engineering at the University of Florida, she studies and models people’s behavior during disasters.

I caught up with Zhao by phone to discuss Hurricane Ian and how the science of evacuations is responding to the threat of bigger storms and wildfires.

Our conversation has been edited