When one of our assistant instructors in Colorado, Gina Gonzales, pinged me on Facebook a few weeks ago, she said that the fires in the West were predicted to be worse than ever this year. She wanted to start warning people to come up with their evacuation plans before they spread. The High Park fire was just cranking up–how could she have known how horrific the ensuing weeks would be?

The main theme of this blog is to learn from the successes and failures of others in similar situations and scenarios that boggle the mind’s ability to understand them. Wildfires can happen anywhere in the world and the USA. In this week’s blog, we will discuss wildfire evacuation planning, in the next, shelter in place planning. Both evacuation plans and shelter in place planning should be a part of the owner’s annual review of disaster mitigation strategies for a facility–and absolutely must be reviewed when fires begin.

Poor examples of “planning” include owners leading their horses down the streets or even interstate evacuation routes, but somehow these always make the newspapers (as those these people are heroes). These last minute poor methods demonstrate the lengths to which people will go to attempt saving their animals, and confirm that most people fail to plan ahead.

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