Colorado Springs City Council got a sales pitch Monday on how much better the wildfire evacuation software the city has already purchased could get in the coming months with the addition of traffic modeling and a partnership with Google.
The city purchased Zonehaven software to help manage wildfire evacuations and in September the company expects to provide traffic modeling services to show how long it could take to evacuate specific zones of town, said Steve Sickler, head of field operations. So if a fire official was calling for an evacuation and saw that it could take five hours to evacuate several zones, the official could scale back the evacuation and evacuate the zones in greatest danger first to help address traffic. Such decisions could be informed by the fire behavior model Zonehaven uses to predict how fast a fire could move. Once fire officials decide on an evacuation zone, the software can send alerts out to multiple platforms, such as social media, texts and traditional media at the same time.
The model will also allow the city to add a specific number of cars at a venue, such as an amphitheater, to see how that could change evacuation times.
“You could run the model, see where the choke points are, see where the roads that would be the most congested are and so forth,” he said.
In January, Zonehaven expects to launch a partnership with Google Maps that will alert drivers to evacuation orders and direct them to shelters if they need to get one, he said. Google can crowdsource key information, such as road closures and fallen trees, he said. The company has a similar partnership with Waze.
The company updates data annually but the city could add in new residents or development projects on an ongoing basis as apartments are built, he said.
Sickler also encouraged the city to look into the steps Marin County is taking around wildfire evacuation mitigation steps. For example, roads can be widened to address slow evacuation times and developers can be asked to pay for some of those measures if they want to densify an area, he said.
The city bought Zonehaven amid ongoing advocacy for better wildfire preparedness as the state’s fires have grown in speed and intensity.
The city paid $74,000 for the first year of services and expects to pay $36,000 annually in the coming years, Fire Chief Randy Royal said previously.
Wildfire safety advocates in Colorado Springs don’t oppose Zonehaven but would like to see the city do more, including modeling evacuation times ahead of time with free software, providing residents with maps of possible evacuation routes ahead of time and using evacuation times to help guide development.
“It’s not the advanced evacuation modeling that we have been asking for since the beginning,” Westside Watch advocate Dana Duggan said of Zonehaven.
She noted relying on electronic notification can be problematic if cellphone communications went down during a fire and that’s where evacuation maps showing primary and secondary routes could be helpful.
Advocates have also voiced concern in the past that zoned evacuations may not work well in fast-moving fires.
The advocates are working with a company on an online tool to provide residents with an estimate of how long it could take to evacuate from their homes and maps with routes. The group expects to release it in the next month at westsidewatch.org.
“I think the public has a right to know,” she said.
