🔥 Planning Wildfire Evacuations

About this simulation

Emergency planners combine three streams of information into one evacuation timeline: how dangerous fire conditions are today, how much traffic the exit roads can actually carry, and how quickly the alert system reaches residents. This scene models a fire front advancing on a small community, with vehicles streaming out along the open evacuation routes once the alert fires.

How it works

• Risk score — a blend of the fire danger index and wind speed, which together set how fast the flame front advances and how far embers are cast downwind.
• Route capacity — each open lane clears roughly one vehicle every few seconds; fewer lanes mean the same number of households take much longer to leave.
• Alert lead time — the delay between a trigger condition (fire crossing a distance threshold) and the siren/notification actually going out. Longer lead times eat directly into the safety margin before the fire arrives.
• Clearance estimate — the model's projection of how long it will take every household to leave once the alert sounds, compared against the fire's time-to-arrival.

Controls

• Fire danger index — combines dryness, temperature and terrain into a 10–100 severity score.
• Wind speed — pushes the fire front and embers toward the community and tilts the flame plume.
• Open road lanes — how many lanes of the evacuation route are usable (traffic control, closures, contraflow).
• Alert lead time — minutes of delay before the siren/alert reaches residents after conditions trigger it.
• Alert siren — force the siren on manually to see vehicles begin leaving immediately. ↺ Reset scenario restarts the fire and evacuation clock. Drag to rotate, scroll to zoom.

Did you know?

Studies of real wildfire evacuations (e.g. the 2018 Camp Fire in California) found that road capacity — not vehicle speed — is usually the binding constraint: even short delays in issuing alerts can erase the entire safety margin once a fire is moving fast under wind-driven conditions.