Wildfire Evacuation Challenges Six Roads to Safety

Six Roads to Safety: A critical threshold for wildfire survival. If your community was threatened by a wildfire, would you be able to quickly evacuate? A new study from UC Santa Barbara reveals that the number of roads out of a community may be one of the strongest predictors of wildfire fatalities, and that a surprisingly specific threshold separates high-risk communities from safer ones. The study's lead author, Caitlin Fong, UC Santa Barbara's National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) and Bren School of Environmental Science & Management - University of California, Santa Barbara compiled the most extensive georeferenced wildfire fatality dataset to date, covering 342 deaths across the United States from 2008 to 2024.