Wildfire Evacuation From Berkeley Hills Could Take Over 4 Hours, Study Finds

Berkeley’s roadways don’t have the capacity for large-scale evacuation and, as a result, fleeing from the hills during a wildfire could take longer than four hours, according to a new study commissioned by the city.

The study conducted by KLD Associates mapped evacuation patterns and simulated escape times based on a repeat of the 1923 Berkeley Fire, which burned north of the UC Berkeley campus, destroying over 600 structures and displacing thousands of residents. Depending on where a fire ignites, researchers identified specific chokepoints on busy intersections and freeway onramps, where cars would likely gridlock in an urgent evacuation.

“The streets were built a long time ago,” said Keith May, deputy fire chief of the Berkeley Fire Department. “So the road capacity is tight already. And then when you factor in evacuating residents out and also getting emergency vehicles in to fight the fire or to do evacuations, that’s a tight network.”

Harrowing evacuations through traffic-choked roads are unfortunately common in California, with its many hillside communities that often only have one or a handful of roads in and out. That has led to some of the state’s most deadly fires, including the Camp Fire, when over 25,000 Paradise residents attempted to evacuate the area only to get caught in a massive traffic jam. Eighty-five people were killed.

The Berkeley study also estimated how long it would take residents to evacuate during large-scale tsunamis, which exceeded two hours for residents fleeing low-lying coastal areas in the middle of the day.

In the case of both wildfires and tsunamis, the report emphasized the need for residents to evacuate as early as possible.

“Leave early if you can,” May said. He suggested residents leave the hills even before a fire ignites on red flag days. “Just get out of the hills so you’re not part of that evacuation problem. The less cars on the roadway, the faster the evacuation time will go.”

The evacuation times laid out in the study could be a dramatic underestimate, according to Stanford wildfire researcher Michael Wara, who was not involved in the Berkeley study.

“I would interpret this study as an absolute minimum on the evacuation time,” he said. “I would say this is the floor, and in reality, things would be worse.”

That’s because researchers only took into consideration the outflow of traffic from the hills, Wara said, and not the inflow of emergency response vehicles.

“If you pretend in your model that the fire trucks aren’t there, you’re gonna miss the places where it may be most significant because it’s really hard to get fire trucks up the hill and people down the hill at the same time,” he said.

Still, Wara said, knowing where the traffic chokepoints will be during a rapid evacuation is critical for getting people out safely. He pointed to the emergency response during the Palisades Fire in Los Angeles earlier this year, including the use of bulldozers to push abandoned vehicles to the sides of the roads.

“That was a remarkable display of evacuation preparedness and acumen on the part of the fire department in Los Angeles,” he said. “If those bulldozers had not been prepositioned at the places where the city thought there would be a gridlock, who knows what would have happened?”

Another potentially helpful tool, Wara said, is implementing parking restrictions on certain roadways to open them up as evacuation routes.

In Mill Valley, for example, parking is limited on certain streets during high fire danger days.

Berkeley has similar restrictions on the Fourth of July, but May said the city is looking to expand those restrictions.

“Right now we’re trying to get every one of our county partners in sync with the idea,” he said. “And then we have to socialize it and get it out to the public, because they are the ones that are gonna be directly affected from the enforcement side of it.”

In the meantime, May said Berkeley residents should sign up for emergency alerts and download the city’s evacuation map to plan out their routes. He advises familiarizing yourself with your neighborhood and having at least two different evacuation routes in mind.

The city will also hold a series of workshops beginning in August for residents to get help in their evacuation preparations.