Village Beat
MFPD Approves Evacuation Study
Montecito Fire Protection District’s evacuation map was looked at closely as part of the District’s recent Emergency Evacuation Study that was approved last week
by Kelly Mahan Herrick
L
ast Friday, July 22, the Montecito Fire Protection District Board of Directors was given a presentation by Chelsea Richer of Fehr & Peers, a consultant company hired by the District to conduct an in-depth study of the District’s evacuation plan. The study took hundreds of hours over 10 months to complete and provided the District with a scientifically valid analysis of the evacuation challenges in Montecito. Montecito Fire Chief Kevin Taylor tells us the need for the study followed the devastating outcome of the Camp Fire in Paradise, California, which started on November 8, 2018, and caused 85 civilian fatalities, several of which occurred while people were evacuating the flames. “Paradise was the first community in California to conduct an extensive evacuation study over fifteen years ago,” Chief Taylor said. “Districts throughout California looked at their evacuation study as the gold standard, and it was what we all strived for. It served as the framework for every evacuation plan in the wildland/urban
28 July – 4 August 2022
interface in California. Unfortunately, in the Camp Fire, given our new norm in fire behavior, we learned that that evacuation plan didn’t work. Several community members tragically lost their lives as a result of that fire, and we don’t want that here.” Montecito has been evacuated 10 times since the Tea Fire due to life threatening wildfire and debris flow events. According to Chief Taylor, these events provided the District with information that informed the existing Evacuation Plan, but the plan does not consider spatial analytical methods like spatial statistics, critical cluster optimization, and traffic simulations. The study included four key components: critical review of 18 evacuation after-action reports across California; a community survey with 118 Montecito resident responses; interviews with police and fire subject matter experts; and traffic operations modeling to identify locations where congestion accumulates on our roadway network. Information gleaned from the after-action reports indicated that
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