Wildfire study urges refuge areas for communities with too few roads

Wildfire researchers are pushing a more unsettling idea into the center of disaster planning: if a fast-moving fire can outrun an evacuation, communities may need a planned place to ride it out. A new University of California, Santa Barbara study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that wildfire fatalities rise sharply in communities with six or fewer major exit roads, suggesting that road networks themselves can decide who gets out alive.

The study estimates that 17.7 million Americans live in communities too road-poor to evacuate safely. That finding is forcing a broader debate over whether public safety plans should rely only on evacuation, or also include hardened refuge space for the moments when leaving is no longer possible. The question reaches beyond fire response into transportation planning, land use and development policy.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology has already begun to formalize that shift. Its updated ESCAPE guidance describes Temporary Fire Refuge Areas as pre-designated locations meant to increase survival odds when evacuation cannot happen. NIST said the approach drew on lessons from the 2018 Camp Fire and feedback from more than 30 communities across California.

The Camp Fire remains the clearest warning of what happens when speed, terrain and road capacity collide. The fire killed 85 people, destroyed more than 18,000 structures, scorched 153,336 acres and forced the evacuation of about 40,000 people. Sixty-six of the 86 fatalities were in Paradise, California, where Butte County had already labeled the town a Community at Risk in 2001 and flagged evacuation and emergency access by road as matters of real concern.

That disaster also showed that improvised refuges were already part of the response. NIST’s Camp Fire case study found 31 temporary refuge areas were used, involving more than 1,200 civilians, and identified 198 evacuation assistance and rescue events involving at least 1,000 civilians. Caltrans research has separately said Camp Fire traffic was slowed by roadway capacity constraints, underscoring how quickly roads can become the bottleneck in an emergency.

The pattern has repeated elsewhere. Berry Creek had only two exits when the North Complex Fire killed 13 people there in 2020. Lahaina had four exit routes when 102 people died in the 2023 fire in Hawaii. For fire-prone communities, the argument is no longer whether evacuation matters, but how to build a credible backup when evacuation fails without sending the dangerous message that people can wait too long.