"On a warm summer morning, two fire officials navigate an SUV along a narrow road that switchbacks high into the hills above the town of Fairfax, California, where thickets of trees conceal hundreds of homes. When the road dead-ends, they head back down through the same hairpin turns, pointing out where a wildfire would roar into the path of fleeing vehicles.
“Most communities were not designed to accommodate every resident evacuating simultaneously,” said Dan Mahoney, chief of the Ross Valley Fire Department, which serves the town of 7,500 in Marin County. “In a lot of areas, there’s only one way in and out.”
With climate-exacerbated heat waves triggering blazes across the U.S. and around the world this summer, evacuation is fast becoming an existential challenge. Firestorms now ignite without warning as temperatures soar, increasingly spreading at lightning speed into cities like Los Angeles that border wildlands. Mounting death tolls in the U.S., Australia, Chile and other countries over the past decade have revealed how unprepared many policymakers and residents are for such rapidly moving infernos."
