Integrating fire-spread and household-level trigger modeling to stage wildfire evacuation warnings

Wildfire evacuation trigger points are agreed-upon prominent geographic features (e.g., ridges, rivers, and roads) used in wildfire evacuation practices, and when a fire crosses these features, an evacuation is recommended for the communities or firefighter crew in the path of the fire (Cook, 2003; Cova et al., 2005). Spatial modeling of wildfire evacuation triggers has used fire-spread modeling and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to calculate evacuation trigger buffers (ETBs) around a location with a specified amount of warning time as the input (Cova et al., 2005; Dennison et al., 2007). Sorensen (1991) points out that evacuation warnings have a significant effect on evacuation timing. This work explores the potential uses of fire-spread and household-level wildfire evacuation trigger modeling in establishing staged evacuation warning zones.