Wildfires are a common threat in L.A. But evacuation drills are rare. (original) (raw)

TOPANGA, Calif. — As fire raced across the Santa Monica Mountains last week, Scott Ferguson knew the drill. His geographically isolated and fire-prone community in western Los Angeles County has been taking disaster preparation seriously ever since a 1993 fire destroyed hundreds of homes there. He had packed the car so many times he knew what to take and where to go.

“When you see a bright orange sky or flames coming at you, it’s human nature to panic,” Ferguson said. “When you’re organized, that’s less likely.”

But on the other side of the fast-moving Palisades Fire, it was a very different scene: People abandoning cars along Sunset Boulevard as they found themselves trapped in gridlock, literally running for their lives. The chaos exposed a glaring lack of preparation and planning — especially for so many who didn’t think their community was so vulnerable.

Given human nature, experts say it often takes a catastrophe to make disaster preparedness a priority, with evacuation drills and other efforts to boost communication and education. As California and the nation grapple with the scale of devastation in such a densely populated metropolitan area, a critical question is how greater readiness could have changed the course of the past week for the thousands of people who have lost homes, businesses or even loved ones — and how that could be improved before the next fires.

“We were sitting ducks,” said Sarah Kamdar, a Pacific Palisades resident who was among those fleeing on foot as fire exploded through their community Jan. 7. Without an evacuation plan or drills to anticipate such a dire situation, “you can’t be surprised at the way people reacted,” she said.

For communities facing the highest fire risks — and the fewest escape routes — the importance of preparedness is just part of life. Ferguson leads the Topanga Coalition for Emergency Preparedness, a group that for several decades has been helping improve communications and education for scenarios from fires to earthquakes to flooding and mudslides. He said he sees its work as “just part of the responsibility” of living in a high-risk zone.

In Mandeville Canyon, another isolated strip in the mountains north of Pacific Palisades, community leaders have also pushed for evacuation drills.

They held the most recent one in 2019 — just months before the Getty Fire forced thousands in Brentwood to flee — and encouraged families to join by setting up a carnival at the designated meeting point at Paul Revere Charter Middle School. Teri Kahn, who lived in Mandeville for 30 years before leaving last April, remembers it as a huge undertaking and one that the community hasn’t been able to replicate since.

John Binder, president of the Upper Mandeville Canyon Association, said that when he talked to fire officials years ago about potential evacuation drills, they told him they had not done them in the canyons because of the staffing required and a lack of resident participation. He said they then proposed more limited drills, with residents driving to the end of their driveways instead of out of the community.

“We’ve been very active trying to wake people up to the need for fire drills,” Binder said Sunday.

Residents of Topanga Canyon, near the Pacific Palisades area, gathered at a community volunteer center Jan. 13 as they prepared for another wind event. (Video: Molly Hennessy-Fiske, Julie Yoon/The Washington Post)

Even so, such activities are not common practice in California or anywhere fires are a major threat, according to Haizhong Wang, a professor of civil and construction engineering at Oregon State University who has studied emergency evacuation behavior.

The drills are difficult to plan because wildfires are so unpredictable, he said. Safe evacuation routes depend on the direction a fire is moving, and that can change radically and rapidly as embers are carried aloft by strong winds. By contrast, tsunamis and hurricanes have paths that can be predicted.

The logistics of staffing evacuation routes and closing roadways for drills is so complicated, Wang noted, the planning process can take a year or longer. But he and other experts point to the stunning scenes in Los Angeles as proof of how important this work should be.

While regulations dictate how often large office buildings must conduct fire drills, there are no such requirements for communities across the United States to practice wildfire evacuations, said Enrico Ronchi, a senior lecturer at Lund University in Sweden who studies such evacuations. That’s not the case in Canada, which in 2021 established a national plan for wildland fires that includes evacuation planning guidelines.

Practicing evacuations is important so people aren’t in the middle of a real emergency packing bags for the first time and deciding which route to take to safety, Ronchi said. And the results of drills can also help emergency managers identify road bottlenecks that could slow the evacuation process, allowing them to better prevent gridlock during an actual crisis, he said.

“Way-finding in such stressful situations is not trivial,” Ronchi said.

Binder said the Mandeville drills showed residents what to do; firefighters he talked to considered them useful, too, he added. Now, residents are putting them into action.

“No matter what happens, we learn,” he said. “People have been educated, but it’s good to have the physical experience.”

Yet there are always those who are reluctant to obey evacuation orders — whether because they have made it through unscathed in the past or because they want to stay to help protect their community.

“The old-school people from Topanga, we just won’t leave,” said Nami Erskine, a Topanga native who stayed at home last week as the Palisades Fire approached. On Monday, she was at the community fire station, where some local volunteers were loading pallets of water and others were bringing supplies for the first responders. “We will leave if we’re going to perish, but we want to stick together.”

In Pacific Palisades, where Erskine has also lived, many residents didn’t have the same level of fire preparedness because the lower elevations had never faced a major threat, she said. “Topanga has this thought process. Palisades doesn’t.”

Will the horror of the past week serve as the wake-up call more communities need? Will evacuation drills and preparation become ingrained across Southern California or the West? Some people are hoping so.

“This has been the hardest challenge for a long time: Getting people to realize the fire risk in their neighborhood,” said Ken Pimlott, the former longtime chief of Cal Fire, whose own community outside of Sacramento held an evacuation drill last year.

Chief Kristin Crowley of the Los Angeles Fire Department said Monday that her agency was bracing for more heavy winds, with “pre-positioned engines, strike teams, task forces across the city to make sure that we have the ability to rapidly respond.” She urged residents to abide by evacuation orders.

“The danger has absolutely not passed,” Crowley warned.

For Kahn, the former Mandeville resident, her worries about the disasters that she feared were ahead there prompted her son to jokingly start referring to her as Chicken Little, the folk-tale character who believed the sky was falling down. The specter of fires like the ones raging across Los Angeles became so daunting, she moved all of her keepsakes to a storage unit in a safer area.

Ultimately, she and her husband decided to leave their spacious and picturesque home in Mandeville for a condo in Westwood. Still, she is always planning for the wildfires ahead.

“This could happen again in a month,” Kahn said. “This is where we live.”