A behavioral design approach to understanding the Altadena evacuation tragedy

By Destiny Aman, JPoint Strategic Design SME & CEO

Interactive maps from the Washington Post article provide a detailed timeline of evacuation alerts for the Altadena wildfires.

CW: This post and the powerful article it references deals with a tragic topic.

In the risk public communications space, we often talk about how to encourage audiences to act the way we want them to in response to official guidance – like preparing for hurricanes, buying flood insurance, or compiling emergency kits. We often identify barriers to action – like past experiences that may affect people’s ability to make decisions when disaster strikes, or the common tendency to downplay high-risk situations. We also consider cognitive biases such as anchoring (when people rely too heavily on the first piece of information they are given) or optimism bias. These are all issues that frequently keep people from listening and following official guidance.

But what about audiences that are very likely to respond to official guidance, but due to operational issues, such guidance never comes? We saw this in the Maui wildfires, during the Texas snowstorms, the Northern California Camp wildfire, and now during the tragic Southern California wildfires that broke out in January, affecting communities like Altadena. The Washington Post (gift article) recently detailed how in Altadena , evacuation orders came unevenly, too late, or not at all. People in some areas refused to leave, even when urged by their families, friends, and neighbors – some walking their dogs or otherwise engaging in normal daily activities – saying they were waiting for official evacuation orders that never came. Even as smoke and embers swirled around in 90mph winds, residents chose to stay and wait for an alert that was never issued. All seventeen deaths in Altadena occurred in a square mile pocket that did not receive orders or emergency alerts until it was too late. The Washington Post’s mapping shows that the fires came within 700 feet of the victims before any evacuation orders were issued. 

At JPoint Collaborative, we specialize in communicating around risk, disaster, disruption, and change. My dissertation research specifically focused on improving wildfire communication in California, and we we have multiple collaborators and clients who have been affected by wildfire, so this topic hits particularly close to home for us. 

In seeing the evacuation timeline information coming out of Altadena, we asked – what can behavioral science tell us about why some of these people might have stayed? Below are some themes.

1. Normalcy Bias: People generally tend to underestimate the likelihood and severity of a disaster because they assume things will continue as they always have. They may interpret warning signs as exaggerated or believe that the situation will resolve without extreme action. We saw this a lot during the early days of the pandemic, when people were reluctant to take precautionary action, almost as if doing so would legitimize the fears that they and many were having. We also see this with hurricane evacuation, where people are actually less likely to evacuate if they’ve been through an evacuation (especially a miss) in the past. In these cases, the perceived normalcy of the risk can actually reduce protective action behavior. In the case of the wildfires, Southern CA has a great deal of experience with wildfires that occur in the hills around populated areas. Longtime residents who have experienced wildfires nearby may have assumed that this event was like others and would be handled similarly.  

2. Authority Bias: It’s common for people to defer decision-making to perceived authorities, assuming that if officials haven’t issued an evacuation order, it must not be necessary yet. They may not trust their own judgment in the face of uncertainty. This kind of bias is generally seen as positive for situations where spontaneous individual action (like panic shopping or mass exiting from an event) might have negative effects – officials do try to discourage hoarding supplies or clogging up roadways so that more people have the ability to reduce risk in an orderly way. However, if residents expect to hinge their decision-making on certain actions by public officials, they may in fact attenuate their own risk perception by mistrusting their own assessment of risk factors that would otherwise urge them to take action, leading to sometimes fatal delays in evacuations and other actions.

How can we use these concepts to help us improve communication and resilience in disaster spaces? 

1. Normalcy Bias: Public communications campaigns must take into account the many layered experiences communities have with different hazards. Long-term campaigns to educate communities about risk should emphasize what is special and different about today’s wildfire risk. Be specific. Traditional conceptions of fire are no longer accurate. Heavy winds and dry brush result in fires being considered “an air war”, where embers fly miles from the front. Cities and urban areas are no longer safe, as they have been in the past, just because they have lots of concrete. These streets will not keep us safe. But we will.  

2. Authority Bias: This is trickier. It would be easy to pin this issue entirely on the operational failure itself. We may never know exactly where the communication breakdown occurred in Altadena, and which agencies or companies involved in California’s wildfire alert system played part in the calamitous results – who failed to inform whom, who didn’t act in a timely manner, at what crucial point in time these potential mistakes may have been made, and what lack of standardization or training may have affected individuals and agencies responsible for decision-making. Certainly, the Hawaii failure centered squarely on this type of detail.  

But to focus only on the operational level would miss much of the wider issue. The size and scale of the threat demands a new, more balanced approach to the problem. The cognitive and behavioral impacts of these massive disasters suggest that what we also need is to critically revisit the current paradigms that underpin communication and interaction between all members of the fight – including the public itself.  

Emergency management officials occupy a social position that grants them certain benefits (like respect, authority, and trust) in communicating with the public. But this role can set them apart from the people they serve in sometimes unhelpful ways. For example, a common cultural belief that the general public is irrational and prone to unpredictable (read: ‘hysterical’) behavior during emergencies is…not great for connecting with the public. “Well, that’s exactly what the takeaway from the Altadena fire suggests!” But the story here highlights a symptom, not the cause.  

Anything that keeps public communicators from meeting people at their level and providing information in a way they are able to access, understand, and respond to is a problem. And the issue cuts both ways – the idea that emergency management officials are always fully aware of an ongoing situation, and infallible in their decision-making is also both untrue and unhelpful. And yet post-event hotwashes often focus primarily on the operational gaps in emergencies – who didn’t make the big call, who didn’t receive it, etc. Closing process loops is important, but focusing there won’t fix the bigger communication divides that regularly keep emergency managers from being able to collaborate fully with the public.

To be responsive to the intensified emergencies of the present and future, we all need to acknowledge, build, support, and rely on the power and expertise of the public – including their creativity, their decision-making capacity, and their courage. There will not be enough resources in future emergencies for emergency officials to fully “command and control” every situation. The public needs to take a bigger role in planning, in designing local outreach activities, and in helping learn from situations like Hawaii and Altadena. 

To prevent the worst from happening, emergency managers can’t rely solely on a top-down model where the ideating, decision-making, and actionable steps are undertaken solely by emergency management officials without also including the populations to which they serve. For our part, at JPoint Collaborative, our team of risk and disaster communicators, strategists, and designers are working toward building a community emergency management model that strengthens the relationships between those with official authority and those members of the community who live and work and respond to disasters as residents. We use research, tools, and approaches that inspire members of the public to get involved in building the future alongside emergency managers, and fully own their role as creators of that future. And we resist the urge to point at purely operational gaps for these kinds of failures.

The communication challenges we face in the risk, disaster, and disruption spaces are only going to get more complex. We need to build relationships that honor that complexity and harnesses its power to keep communities safe. At JPoint Collaborative, we grieve the loss of life and place in these and other recent disasters. We will continue to do our part to help support, prepare, and learn from our communities, while appreciating the transformative power of disaster to shed light on who we need to be moving forward.