Critical Behavioral Lessons from Past Wildfire Evacuations

This presentation focuses on a deep understanding of the evacuation behaviors in wildfires using two devastating wildfire cases: the 2018 Mati wildfire in Greece and the 2023 Maui wildfire in Hawaii, US. What went wrong and what are the critical lessons that we can learn from both events to prevent large number of fatalities in future wildfire events. There are striking similarities between the two events: (1) both communities are coastal historic towns with dry vegetation and high winds while the fire happened, (2) both are densely populated with limited evacuation route system and capacity, (3) no official warning in both fires, (4) both fires resulted in many fatalities with 104 in Mati and over 100 in Maui, (5) insufficient firefighting resources, (6) confusing messaging and delayed evacuation alerts, and (7) presence of transient population. The authors have collected residents’ evacuation decision-making and logistical behaviors in response to wildfires through household-based surveys from both Mati (150 samples) and Maui (650 samples). This paper will use these empirical datasets collected from both communities to assess and measure the successes and failures in both evacuation scenarios which are all self-initiated. The authors have also established an interdisciplinary and integrated agent-based wildfire evacuation models (ABWEM) for both communities. The household datasets will be used to validate the ABWEMs.