On July 11th, HCRI Director Dr. Brittany Brand participated in Ashland, Oregon’s Wildfire Evacuation Summit.
The event was born out of Dr. Brand’s collaboration with Kelly Burns, City of Ashland Emergency Management Coordinator, with the goal of addressing Oregon and California’s long history of wildfires and increasingly complex natural disasters.
Participants left the summit with a greater understanding of:
- what a successful mass evacuation entails
- professional roles in an effectively coordinated mass evacuation
- potential human response challenges during an evacuation (evacuate early, evacuate late, stay and defend, mobility impairment).
An additional outcome was that participants felt capable of implementing or participating in a coordinated and effective wildfire mass evacuation situation.
Kelly Burns developed, coordinated, and facilitated the event. Dr. Brand aligned learning outcomes with evaluations to develop a pre- and post-summit questionnaire to assess workshop satisfaction, shifts in perceptions, and potential behavior changes related to better coordination and response.
In response to the question of what was valuable from the summit, one attendee writes,
“The importance of having a plan and educating the citizens. This was not the case in my city, but I had a meeting today with the Fire Chief, Public Works, City Manager, and we are going to develop one.”