As devastating wildfires tear through Los Angeles, traffic gridlock is slowing evacuation efforts, forcing some residents to abandon their vehicles and highlighting the challenges of emergency response in one of America’s most congested cities.
Los Angeles Chief of Police Jim McDonnell acknowledged that while the city is “well versed in traffic,” the current crisis has proved to be “an extra test.” Officials are urging residents to stay off roads to allow emergency vehicles access to affected areas.
The situation has become particularly dire in Pacific Palisades, where narrow, hilly streets converge into just a few main roads. The Los Angeles Fire Department has resorted to using bulldozers to clear abandoned vehicles from Palisades Drive and Sunset Boulevard to create paths for emergency responders.
Among those helping to move vehicles was Police Academy star Steve Guttenberg, who told Good Morning America: “When people abandon their cars, you’ve got to leave your keys in there, so guys like me can move them.”
In Altadena, resident Alexia Palomino, 27, told Redding Record Searchlight about her harrowing early morning evacuation. “It was just jam-packed with cars everywhere,” she said. “It was just to the point where you couldn’t see and couldn’t breathe.”
The current crisis occurs despite recent legislative efforts to improve evacuation planning. Following the deadly 2018 Camp Fire in Paradise, California passed several laws requiring counties to include evacuation planning in their general plans.
Tom Cova, a University of Utah professor specializing in emergency management and transportation issues, praised California as “a leader” in evacuation planning, while noting that wind-driven fires like the current ones may not allow for staged evacuations.
Los Angeles County’s emergency operations plan acknowledges the region’s vulnerability, ranking it as “the community with the most risk in the United States” according to FEMA’s National Risk Index. While the county has developed evacuation route maps, these have limitations, with minor roads in mountainous areas sometimes unnamed.
As of Thursday morning, the fires have forced at least 130,000 people to evacuate, destroyed over 2,000 properties, and claimed five lives. Officials describe the situation as an “unprecedented” emergency that has stretched local firefighting resources to their limits.
Images: AdobeStock, for illustrative purposes only
TTi investigated the related challenges of emergency evacuations in relation to hurricanes and flooding in its September 2024 edition
