as forest fires troubled neighborhoods throughout Los Angeles this week, residents and authorities face a daunting and almost impossible challenge: convincing hundreds of thousands of people to leave their homes to escape danger, in a matter of hours or even minutes.

In doing so, officials put into practice years’ worth of research on wildfire evacuations. The farm is small but growing, mirroring recent studies suggesting that the frequency of severe fires has more than doubled since 2023. The increase was led by devastating fires in the western United States, Canada, and Russia.

“Certainly the interest (in evacuation research) has increased because of the frequency of fires,” said Asad Ali, a doctoral student in engineering at North Dakota State University whose work focuses on the field. “We see more publications, more articles.”

When displacements go wrong, they are really wrong. In LA’s Pacific Palisades neighborhood, panicked drivers stuck in traffic abandoned their cars in the middle of evacuation routes, leaving emergency crews unable to reach the fires. Authorities used bulldozers to push empty cars off the road.

To prevent this kind of chaos, researchers are trying to answer some basic but critical questions: Who will respond to what kind of warnings? And when are people likely to recover from injury?

Many of the researchers’ ideas about evacuations come from other types of disasters—from studies of residents’ reactions to floods, nuclear disasters, or volcanic eruptions, and especially hurricanes.

But hurricanes and wildfires differ in some obvious, and not so obvious, ways. Hurricanes are often larger and affect entire regions, which may require multiple states and agencies to work together to help people travel farther. But hurricanes are also relatively predictable and slow-moving, and tend to give authorities more time to organize escapes and strategize about gradual evacuations, so that everyone is not hit the road. Fires are highly unpredictable and require rapid communication.

People’s decisions to go or stay were also affected by an inconvenient reality: Residents who stayed during the storm could do nothing to avoid the disaster. But for those who stay between fires to protect their homes with hoses or water, the gamble sometimes works. “Psychologically, wildfire evacuation is very difficult,” Asad said.

Research so far suggests that reactions to wildfires, and whether people choose to stay, go, or just wait a while, can be determined by several factors: whether residents have passed wildfire warnings; before, and if the warnings are there. followed by actual threats; how to communicate the emergency to them; and how the neighbors around them react.

deer survey of about 500 California wildfire evacuations conducted in 2017 and 2018 found that some longtime residents who had experienced multiple past fire incidents were less likely to evacuate—but others did the opposite. In general, low-income people are less likely to flee, possibly because of limited access to transportation or places to stay. These types of surveys can be used by authorities to create models that tell them when to designate which people to evacuate.

One difficulty in wildfire evacuation research today is that researchers don’t necessarily classify wildfire events in the “severe weather” category, said Kendra K. Levine, the library director of the Institute of Transportation Studies. at UC Berkeley. The wind in Santa Ana in Southern California, for example, is not unusual. This happens every year. But combine the wind with the region’s historic—and likely climate change-related—dryness, and wildfires are starting to look like weather. “People started to agree” with the relationship, Levine said, which led to increased interest and scholarship among extreme weather specialists.

Asad, the North Dakota researcher, said he already has meetings about using the data collected during this week’s disasters in future research. It’s a small silver lining, that the horror experienced by Californians this week may provide valuable insights that can help others avoid the worst in the future.