Project Summary
Wildfires are known to have devastating consequences for urban and rural communities, often resulting in loss of life, loss and damage to personal properties and public instructure, and other adverse outcomes. A number of studies have pointed to important disparities in experiences of wildfire ramifications, for different communities. Some studies highlight limited access to alternative transportation modes for wildfire evacuation as a driving force for disparities in wildfire impacts for vulnerable communities. Other constraints like accessibility to evacuation centers, limited timely information, loss of cell phones, and damage to communications infrastructure result in longer evacuation times for vulnerable households. While much attention in the literature has focused on wildfire evacuation disparities tied to transportation and communications infrastructure and policy needs, limited focus has been on transportation and infrastructure related needs to support recovery and resilience from wildfire events, and for vulnerable communities. There is a critical need to synthesize the existing state of knowledge on priority needs and effective practices for (1) safe and timely wildfire evacuations, and (2) re-entry and recovery, with emphasis on the most vulnerable and under-resourced communities.
To support recovery and resiliency efforts for the January 2025 wildfires in the Los Angeles County Area, local governments and supporting transportation agencies will require a clear understanding of specific transportation related drivers of disparities in wildfire impacts (for vulnerable communities relative to more affluent communities), and beyond just the evacuation stage. To fill this gap, we propose to summarize the existing knowledge on transportation and infrastructure related needs for limiting harmful impacts of wildfire and strengthening communities’ recovering from wildfire devastation. Specifically, we propose to review a mixture sources, including available academic articles, public practice reports, and community organization literature. We will further examine and review available transportation and land use data on communities that have experienced past wildfires (such as data from the National Interagency Fire Center data portal, and the Disaster Recovery Tracking Tool from the US Climate Resilience Toolkit) to characterize the transportation infrastructure and demographic characteristics of communities affected in the past, and contrast with any variations in community recovery times
