LA QUESTIONE SECONDO LA PROSPETTIVA SPAGNOLA

The research conducted as part of this thesis comprises the beginning stages of a larger vulnerability assessment that will be conducted in the case study community over the coming years. These stages involve the creation of a conceptual model of protective action decision-making during WUI fires, the creation of a survey to be distributed to the case study community to understand the WUI fire awareness and the expected protective actions of residents, and the modelling of an evacuation of part of the community. It was the initial intention that the survey would be distributed, and the results analyzed as part of this stage of the project, however, due to time constraints (particularly from the required timeframe for highly complicated ethical clearances with the university and community agency partner) this was not possible. Assessing other factors that contribute to the case study community’s vulnerability such as those that contribute to wildfire dynamics (weather, topography, and fuel – moisture, physical properties and

17 arrangement) or the type and layout of the structures within the community were outside the scope of this current thesis. These will, however, be important to consider in the next stages of the project as it continues. A summary of the chapters within this thesis are provided below:

1.7.1 Chapter 1: Introduction

The introduction provides an overview of the Canadian wildland urban interface, and the state of wildfires and WUI evacuations in Canada. It summarizes key global WUI fire events and provides context as to the need for a more comprehensive approach to WUI fire evacuations. It will identify new trends as well as gaps in WUI fire evacuation research and discusses the important role that HBiF plays in the development of comprehensive and effective tools to aid in improving wildfire evacuations.

1.7.2 Chapter 2: Human Behaviour and Protective Action Decision-Making During Wildfires and Hurricanes

Chapter 2 provides a comprehensive literature review of wildfire and hurricane evacuation literature looking at the factors that affect the decision to evacuate. Given that the body of related literature is very small in Canada, the review focuses on wildfire literature from the United States and Australia. Hurricane literature from the United States is also reviewed to supplement the wildfire findings given that the field is more developed. The factors identified in the literature review were used to create a first-stage conceptual model for evacuation decision-making during wildfires using the Protective Action Decision Model (PADM) as a framework [55]. This conceptual model is a first-step in improving the fire safety engineering community’s understanding of the factors that have the greatest impact on the different stages of the decision-making process: pre-decision, credible threat and risk assessment, and protective action decision.

18 For completeness, a summary of the few Canadian studies is also given, however, they were not used in the creation of the conceptual model.

1.7.3 Chapter 3: Communication and Notification During Hazards – Considerations for Canadian WUI Fire Evacuations

Chapter 3 focuses on an important element identified by the conceptual model, namely, notification and communication. It explores the current Canadian public alerting system, with a focus on its new wireless alert component that allows messages to be sent to cellular devices. An exploratory case study analysis of the wireless system’s first official use in 2018 for an Amber Alert and the corresponding public response was conducted using Google Trends data. The implications of the findings from this case study are also discussed in the context of WUI fire evacuations.

1.7.4 Chapter 4: Canadian Case Study

Chapter 4 applies and further develops the insights gained in the previous two chapters to a Canadian WUI case study community. The chapter is broken into two main parts: the creation of a quantitative survey and an evacuation traffic simulation of the case study community.

Part 1: Survey Creation and Data Collection Preparation

The aim of the survey is to collect information about the factors influencing protective action decision-making within the context of a seasonal Canadian WUI community that does not have a recent history of a wildfire evacuation. As such, it is written to collect information about expected actions and behaviours, and how long people anticipate spending on specific pre-evacuation tasks. Given that Canadian policy and practice heavily favours pre-evacuation over staying and defending (and this is the most common practice seen in past Canadian WUI evacuations), the

19 survey questions primarily relate to evacuation and less so to staying and defending during a fire.

The survey is based on the findings from Chapters 2 and 3, and incorporates questions looking at elements common to most of the literature reviewed as well as questions aiming to fill some of the current knowledge gaps.

Part 2: Traffic Simulation

The traffic microsimulation software PTV Vissim was used to model an evacuation of part of the case study community. This software allows for dynamic traffic assessment, thereby enabling interactions between evacuees and the traffic environment, such as making enroute travel decisions, to be modelled. As microsimulation models are computationally more demanding given their level of detail, a specifically vulnerable area of the case study community was modelled (as opposed to the entire community) at this stage. Several simulations were run to see the impact that the number of evacuees and the speed of the evacuation had on the nature of the overall evacuation (total and individual evacuation times, location and degree of congestion).

1.7.5 Chapter 5: Conclusions and Recommendations

Chapter 5 summarizes the findings of the previous chapters and discusses their impact on WUI fire safety and evacuations in Canada. It will discuss the limitations of the work along with recommendations for undertaking similar work in the future. Future work necessary for the continued advancement of the study of HBiF within a Canadian WUI fire context is addressed, including the next stages of the Canadian case study vulnerability assessment project.

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Chapter 2: A First-Stage Conceptual Model of Human Behaviour in Response