Ever wonder how fire agencies decide who and when to evacuate?
It's not a decision made on a hunch. It requires making sense of huge amounts of real-time data and intelligence, and getting it wrong or late can have tragic consequences.
Not than long ago, fatalities in California's wildfires were very rare. But the rapidly accelerating pace and size of fires in the state has taken a heavy toll. Last year's Camp Fire left more than 80 people dead and all but wiped out the town of Paradise. The Tubbs Fire, which ravaged wine country in 2017, resulted in more than 20 deaths. And the Woolsey Fire destroyed more than 1,600 homes in Ventura County last fall, leaving three people dead in its wake.
To help minimize this loss of life and property, the Los Angeles Fire Department and other agencies use cutting-edge technology to model and predict what a fire's going to do next and use that information to figure out who needs to evacuate.