In a City of Sprawl, Wildfire Evacuation Is Getting Harder
As climate change supercharges fire season and more people move to areas that are primed to burn, street design can make a life-saving difference.
A scorched car sits beside the road in Topanga Canyon during Palisades wildfire in Los Angeles on Jan. 10, 2025.
Photographer: Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu via Getty Images
For those familiar with wildfire evacuation, recent images of charred and crushed cars lining the streets of hillside neighborhoods in Los Angeles offered a new variation on a recurring theme: Residents trapped in gridlocked traffic abandoned their vehicles as flames closed in on communities with limited roadway access.
Similar scenes played out during the 2018 Camp Fire in Paradise, California, and more recently in Lahaina during last year’s Maui fires, when traffic jammed up on narrow coastal roads. In those cases, some residents perished while attempting to flee, either in their cars or on foot.