Human Evacuation Behaviour in Wildfires

Speaker: Sandra Vaiciulyte, FSEG UoG and Arup
Authors: S. Vaiciulyte, L. M. Hulse, E. R. Galea, A. Veeraswamy
The number of wildfires occurring globally are growing and the subject has received substantial attention, including studies of wildfires and human behaviour in response to wildfire evacuations in regions such as Australia and the USA. However, regions in Europe have received less attention, despite facing the same issues. In addition, due to lack of standardised methodology of human behaviour in wildfire research make it challenging to compare the results across multiple studies. This gap is addressed in this study by identifying, quantifying and contextualising the aspects of individual and group behaviours in response to wildfire in Wildland-Urban Interface/Intermix. Literature review and a framework for data collection and organisation are presented, and case studies of South of France and Australia, as well as data analysis and results are introduced.
The results have shown that human behaviour characteristics cannot always be generalised across cultures due to local policies and their historical experiences. Therefore, when building wildfire safety measures, motivations for evacuation/staying-in-place and the required safe egress time should be contextualised.
The slides from this presentation are available within the workshop proceedings which can be downloaded from the evacuation workshop website.
Evacuation Workshop website: https://fseg.gre.ac.uk/hbem/

FSEG public reports concerning wildfire urban-scale evacuation produced as GEO-SAFE deliverables can also be downloaded from the FSEG GEO-SAFE website.
FSEG GEO-SAFE website: https://fseg.gre.ac.uk/fire/geo-safe....

The GEO-SAFE project website can be found at: https://geosafe.lessonsonfire.eu/