With wildfire season underway, the U.S. Fire Administration has released a new planning guide designed to help communities prepare for evacuations before disaster strikes.
The National Wildfire Evacuation Planning Guidance gives fire departments, law enforcement agencies, emergency managers, tribal governments, and other organizations a step-by-step framework for creating or improving wildfire evacuation plans. It also includes a customizable evacuation plan template that agencies can adapt to fit their communities.
The guidance was developed using lessons learned from recent wildfires, particularly those that threatened neighborhoods in the wildland-urban interface where homes border forests and grasslands.
The new resource covers every stage of an evacuation, from preparing before a wildfire starts to making decisions and communicating with the public during an emergency. It also includes recommendations for safely allowing residents to return home after a fire and evaluating how evacuation efforts worked.
Federal officials say the guide is intended to help communities build stronger evacuation plans by combining research, real-world experiences from recent fires, and best practices from across the country.
The planning guide is available to fire and emergency management agencies nationwide and is intended to support both new evacuation plans and updates to existing ones.
