Drilling for disaster preparedness: Insights from a community wildfire evacuation exercise

Community evacuation exercises (or drills) are one approach residents and authorities use to train wildfire emergency procedures in the Wildland Urban Interface (WUI). This paper presents results from a drill performed in Roxborough Park, a WUI community in Colorado, USA, in 2024. Observer and self-report data were collected to derive resident preparatory actions, pre-travel, travel, and total evacuation times, as well as route choice and the drill’s impact on their perceived preparedness. It took more than 28 minutes until 90 % of residents began traveling and more than 48 minutes until 90 % had completed their evacuation. Most of the participants reported following the instructions for the evacuation route, with a minority taking a shorter or more familiar route. The work underlines the value of drills for improving community disaster preparedness, providing data for developing/testing computational models, and deepening our understanding of human behavior in wildfire scenarios.