Fire evacuation modelling of a Canadian wildland urban interface community

Abstract

Wildland Urban Interface (WUI) communities are situated at the interface between human development and wildland fuel. In addition to their proximity to susceptible regions, routes of evacuation in WUIs are often limited, posing great risks to these communities in the event of a natural disaster. To begin the research herein, a Canadian WUI community in central Canada was selected as a case study to investigate assembly and evacuation patterns during a fire evacuation to illustrate the complexity of the situation and the current research needs required. First stage simulations of evacuations were performed in the traffic simulation software PTV VISSIM, which extracted useful data including evacuation times and related parameters. Results demonstrated that the predictive power of the software is limited by its ability to incorporate effects of human behaviour and the fire behaviour itself. Thus, extending these findings to include the need for evacuee behaviour and fire dynamics for the formation of a more complete strategic evacuation plans for communities at risk of wildfires.

Wildland fire evacuations in Canada from 1980 to 2021

“…Additionally, a recent study on wildland fire evacuation in Canada's forested regions used the CWFED to examine wildland fire evacuation patterns and the characteristics of fires that necessitated evacuation (Tepley et al 2022). A growing literature on a variety of topics in wildland fire evacuation research has been investigated in Canada, including intended behavioural responses (Cote and McGee 2014), evacuation experiences (Scharbach and Waldram 2016;Downe et al 2018;Asfaw et al 2019;Betancur Vesga 2019;Christianson et al 2019;Mamuji and Rozdilsky 2019;McGee 2019;McGee et al 2019;Mottershead et al 2020;Drolet et al 2021;McGee et al 2021), evacuation reconstructions (Woo et al 2017), evacuation modelling (Folk 2019Wahlqvist et al 2021;Yerushalmi et al 2022), charitable response (Boulianne et al 2018;Yumagulova et al 2019), children (Kulig et al 2018;DeYoung et al 2018), and recovery (Pujadas Botey and Kulig 2014;Shepard et al 2017;Montesanti et al 2021;Lalani et al 2021). Many Indigenous Nations have also released reports related to wildland fire and evacuation experiences, along with calls to action (Clark 2018;NITHA (Northern Inter-Tribal Health Authority) .…”