WILDEFIRESNIST Updates Critical Wildfire Evacuation and Sheltering Guidance

Wildfires move fast. They can reduce communities to ash in a matter of hours. To save as many lives as possible, officials must have an evacuation and shelter plan in place before an actual wildfire threatens their community.

To support planning efforts, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has just updated its guidance on preparing for wildfires based on the latest research and community feedback. Called Wildland-Urban Interface Fire Evacuation and Sheltering Considerations: Assessment, Planning, and Execution (ESCAPE), the report is now available on the NIST website.

This report is especially relevant to the estimated 115 million people in the U.S. who live in areas of high wildfire risk. Many wildfires do not stay confined in remote forests. They can invade neighborhoods and destroy homes, sometimes with only minutes of advance warning. Traditional approaches to evacuation are less effective during such aggressive fires, which can outrun emergency notifications and cut off roads before residents can escape.

“This report can save thousands of lives because it offers a science-backed approach to planning for worst-case scenarios,” said lead author Alexander Maranghides, a fire protection engineer at NIST. “We need a rigorous approach because we have seen, time and time again, that these fires are unforgiving.”

For more than 120 years, NIST has performed research in fire safety and fire science, including many studies of fires at the wildland-urban interface. NIST frequently investigates past fires to learn lessons that will help save lives in future fires.

NIST released the first version of the ESCAPE report in 2023 in conjunction with a case study on the evacuations during the devastating 2018 Camp Fire, which killed 85 people, incinerated more than 18,000 structures and destroyed the town of Paradise, California. The 2023 report took the lessons learned from that investigation and turned them into practical guidance for emergency managers, first responders and community leaders.

ESCAPE provided communities with tools to prepare before the flames arrive. It was the first guidance of its kind. Thirty communities across California quickly incorporated the guidance into their evacuation planning over the last two years. NIST took their feedback along with information from recent fires to update this latest version of ESCAPE.