Evacuation Patterns, Health Risks, and Mobility Strategies Among Transit Riders in the 2025 L.A. Fires
Introduction Fast-moving wildfires pose significant challenges to evacuation, especially for transportation-insecure households with limited access to personal vehicles. The January 2025 Los Angeles fires marked a rare and alarming shift in wildfire events: blazes spread into highly populated urban areas across Los Angeles County, forcing tens of thousands of residents in the Pacific Palisades, Altadena, and parts of Hollywood communities to flee with little notice. Smoke from the fires created widespread health risks, especially for transit riders and people with preexisting health conditions. Yet because no-notice wildfire events have seldom struck urban areas, little is known about how people without reliable access to vehicles evacuate — or the health challenges they face when doing so. In response, this policy brief highlights key findings from a survey conducted through the Transit app in February 2025, collected among transit riders who did and did not evacuate. By centering the experiences of Los Angeles’s transit-riding populations amid unprecedented wildfire smoke and mobility disruptions, the findings offer urgent evidence to inform equitable, health‑conscious emergency and evacuation planning for cities across the United States facing future climate-exacerbated wildfire threats. Research Approach An online survey was distributed through the Transit app, a mobile [...]
Wildfire Recovery and Resilience Strategies for Resource-Constrained and Vulnerable Communities
Wildfires disproportionately impact vulnerable communities, such as low-income families, older adults, people with disabilities, and rural residents. Wildfires not only cause direct destruction, but also intensify existing social inequities (Davies et al., 2018). The primary challenges these groups face lie in inadequate transportation resources to carry out evacuations, non-resilient infrastructure, and inequitable allocations of recovery resources. This brief synthesizes news reports, academic research, and practical case studies and recommends three priority strategies to support efforts to recover from the recent wildfires in Los Angeles County: 1) developing an inclusive evacuation system, 2) allocating resources for community recovery in a fair and equitable manner, and 3) building resilient community transportation systems for the future. These strategies can reduce social inequalities in disaster response and recovery. Background The January 2025 Eaton and Palisades wildfires in Los Angeles County were the first and second most destructive in California’s history (Hanna Park et al., 2025). They caused unprecedented destruction, resulting in 29 fatalities, the loss of 18,000 homes, and forced more than 200,000 residents to evacuate from the affected areas. The wildfires also caused power outages for 414,000 households, and resulted in economic damages exceeding $50 billion (Albani-Burgi, 2025). Although neither [...]