Faster, Fiercer Wildfires Are Testing Evacuation Plans

On a warm summer morning, two fire officials navigate an SUV along a narrow road that switchbacks high into the hills above the town of Fairfax, California, where thickets of trees conceal hundreds of homes. When the road dead-ends, they head back down through the same hairpin turns, pointing out where a wildfire would roar into the path of fleeing vehicles.

“Most communities were not designed to accommodate every resident evacuating simultaneously,” said Dan Mahoney, chief of the Ross Valley Fire Department, which serves the town of 7,500 in Marin County. “In a lot of areas, there’s only one way in and out.”

With climate-exacerbated heat waves triggering blazes across the U.S. and around the world this summer, evacuation is fast becoming an existential challenge. Firestorms now ignite without warning as temperatures soar, increasingly spreading at lightning speed into cities like Los Angeles that border wildlands. Mounting death tolls in the U.S., Australia, Chile and other countries over the past decade have revealed how unprepared many policymakers and residents are for such rapidly moving infernos.

Related: Airbnb Must Face LA Lawsuit Alleging Price Gouging During 2025 Wildfires

That’s spurred new efforts to map evacuation chokepoints and develop strategies to quickly get people to safety. That includes extensive advance planning and modeling how people react to evacuation orders.

“As climate change accelerates and fires burn in places previously thought immune, people who have never had to think about evacuation planning are going to need to start,” said Caitlin Fong, an assistant researcher at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

There are limits to preparation, though, in the era of megafires, according to experts. “Their speed and ferocity can create conditions that overwhelm even the most meticulously crafted plans,” the U.S. government warned in an evacuation guide released in June.

A UC Santa Barbara study published last month underscored the magnitude of the evacuation challenge, finding that 2.5 million people in the US live in small towns at high risk for wildfire but with limited escape routes. Researchers determined that fire fatalities are concentrated in such communities.

Nearly 18 million more people reside in places that face a lower though growing threat of wildfire but where there’s sometimes only one way out of town. Among them, Kentfield, California, a wealthy enclave 5 miles down the road from Fairfax that’s home to Gov. Gavin Newsom. It currently has moderate wildfire risk but only a few exits for its 6,900 residents, according to the study.

Related: 3 Firefighters Killed in Colorado as Wildfires Stoked By Heat, Wind Rage Across West

States like Florida, Hawaii and Oklahoma aren’t classified by the U.S. government as priority wildfire areas as they’re not heavily forested but the researchers discovered increasing evacuation risks there. Heat waves this year, for instance, have dried out vegetation that’s now fodder for fires started by a lightning strike, an errant spark from machinery or arson. Wildfires have burned nearly 204,000 acres in Florida so far in 2026.

In Oklahoma, increasing temperatures and drought have fueled a rise in grassland megafires since 2016. When Fong and her colleagues mapped communities with fewer than 50,000 people to wildfire hazards and lack of egress, they identified dozens of small towns across Oklahoma at high risk.

“That doesn’t necessarily align with most people’s narrative about wildfire being a Western problem,” said Fong, the paper’s lead author.

The Oklahoma Department of Emergency Management has shared the study’s findings with local evacuation planners. “Oklahoma has strengthened planning efforts in the past year to increase wildfire response capabilities,” Annie Mack Vest, the agency’s executive director, said in a statement.

Even urban communities with a history of wildfire risk are discovering they face significant evacuation challenges.

A 2025 evacuation study commissioned by Berkeley, California, whose hillside neighborhoods have burned in the past, concluded that during a major wildfire it would take as long as four hours to evacuate more than 20,000 residents from the hills’ maze-like streets.

The study estimated that 262 buses, 48 wheelchair-accessible vans and 66 ambulances would need to be dispatched to rescue older and infirm residents during a big wildfire, further clogging streets and adding to the logistical complexity of moving thousands of people downhill as firefighting equipment rushes uphill.

Alan Murray, a professor and director of the Wildfire Resilience Initiative at UC Santa Barbara, said that while most disaster planning in the US is designed to evacuate entire regions in the event of a slow-moving catastrophe like a hurricane, wildfires require detailed neighborhood-level preparation.

That’s what his team has done at the street level in Santa Barbara County, creating an interactive map that spotlights potential bottlenecks by identifying the number of people per exit lane in a neighborhood. The map also overlays the location of water hydrants, the moisture content of vegetation, wildfire history, red flag warnings of dangerous fire conditions and other data.

Local officials have attempted to overcome such bottlenecks by limiting street parking during red flag warnings and encouraging residents to preemptively evacuate. Murray said one obstacle to such a strategy is overcoming residents’ fatigue over receiving frequent wildfire alerts in recent years, particularly in Santa Barbara County, which is prone to wildfires, mud slides and other hazards.

“There’s been so many warnings that people are just like, ‘eh, not again,’ ” he said.

In the wake of a series of destructive California wildfires that began in 2017, Marin fire officials commissioned egress risk assessments to map evacuation chokepoints and began “hardening” exit routes by cutting back vegetation to create fire breaks, holding evacuation drills and producing a video showing residents how to “make it downhill alive.”

Fire Chief Mahoney and Mark Brown, executive officer of the Marin Wildfire Prevention Authority, provided a real-life demonstration of those tips while driving down the twisting Fairfax road featured in the video.

For example, they stopped to check conditions as they approached a bend that turns in toward the slope, which would take them into the path of a fire racing uphill. They showed where to find a temporary refuge until the fire passed, such as the driveway of one resident who had cleared vegetation from around their property.

“Our message to the public is simple: Leave early, take as few vehicles as possible, remain in your vehicle and travel downhill,” said Brown.

Top photo: Marin County officials have made escape routes more wildfire resilient and conducted evacuation drills. Photographer: Jonah Reenders/Bloomberg.