Shouting Fire

Designing for emergencies

My day job is being a designer and professor but today I am here to tell you a horror story.

It was an ordinary, quiet, day this summer in a small town in the beautiful town near the border between California and Nevada filled with small quaint shops, hotels, and cafes, and in proximity to world-class skiing. This is a place where a bear wandering into a neighborhood and disturbing trash cans or a minor auto collision is headline news.

I had recently relocated to this idyllic location from the Bay Area. My husband and I had just moved in and were excited to start a new life complete with gardening and stargazing in our future. Our good friend was staying with us to help us get settled and we had been enjoying hikes and lake swims and meeting new neighbors. We hadn’t even started unpacking our boxes and were painting and installing things around the house and yard when I started to smell smoke. At first, I thought it was a neighbors fireplace but then I couldn’t imagine why someone would be using their fireplace when it was 26 degrees and mid-summer.

I went to my computer to see if I could find out where the source of the smoke was and discovered our power was out. Our cell service is a bit spotty in the woods, so I drove to the small town near our home to see if I could get a signal. I finally was able to log into my mobile but, I didn’t know where to get information, since the incident was so new nothing appeared when I searched on Google. I went on NextDoor and finally as a last resort, turned to Twitter to see if anyone posted anything.

I was able to find a post from another resident of the area that linked to a local dashboard of a neighboring community. It was the site that every social media channel linked to and it was down. Experiencing technical difficulties.

The system was down for the first three hours

Then, I got a text message that made me feel a wave of nausea. A friend who lived deeper into the hills texted me with the news there was a massive, fast-moving fire and she said we needed to go and now.

This was the start of a fire that would rage for 11 days and would destroy 705 Acres and 21 homes.

My husband and my friend who was staying with us, packed quickly, locked up the house, loaded up our pets, and headed out of town using the main road.
We drove 40 minutes down a windy road as ash fell onto the car not knowing what we were heading into.

It was terrifying.

And I am one of the fortunate ones. My home was safe. I got out early. We were lucky - this time. Our home was not one of the 10,488 structures on the 4,257,863 acres that burned in 2020 alone. So many are now living without family members, pets, friends, family photos, and peace of mind. A home should be safe and sacred.

But more importantly, I was fortunate because I have access to things we cannot continue to assume others have. I am able-bodied, I have access to information in the form of social media, I have a computer, and a mobile phone, and I have the ability to evacuate because I have a private automobile and I have the means to find a place to stay elsewhere. But most people do not. And I am here to advocate for them.

In addition to being a designer, I also happen to be an aunt. I have an invested interest in the future we are leaving to the next generation and generations beyond and I want to do everything I can to be a good ancestor. I am also a realist and I think we have to accept the fact that dealing with weather-related emergencies is now a way of life and this is probably one of the most important design problems to solve and I believe it takes a human-centered approach.

I design experiences and part of that job is being keenly aware of the context in which the systems I create will operate. But a user interface is simply the expression of the thought and consideration a design takes. Good UX also needs to consider technical constraints and opportunities, and what's appropriate for the given audience based on the context of its use and how you want people to traverse through information.

Too often approaches to large systemic problems get focused on the technology and the user interface but not the broader context in which it will be used and how this piece of the puzzle coexists with other systems. It’s tempting to get excited about the GIS system or robust push notification system but the technology is only as good as how it works in the context in which it is used, its reliability, and most importantly the ability for the intended user to know about it and use it.

In my line of work, we often talk about solving “wicked problems”, wicked problems are defined as a social or cultural problem that is difficult or impossible to solve for as many as four reasons: incomplete or contradictory knowledge, the number of people and opinions involved, the large economic burden, and the interconnected nature of these problems with other problems. Well, dealing with the effects of the climate crisis as it manifests as an emergency response is a classic wicked problem. And In our state of California, this year alone the losses are staggering, in 2020 alone 4.7 million acres have been lost to fire and we are still in fire season.

I maintain that we are living with two existential crises happening at the same time. The climate crisis and the crisis of income and access inequality. And the two are very related.

And the places in which these calamities are occurring are often the least equipped to deal with them. In the Tubbs Fire of 2017 and the Camp Creek Fire of 2018, communities that were populated by seniors and low-income households were the hardest hit. These are areas that already economically depressed, subject to public safety power outages, and have challenges in evacuating. And in the Paradise fire, there was an evacuation plan but many households did not get the alert that their evacuation warning had turned into an evacuation order.

In the last 5 years, state and local agencies have turned to technology, particularly text-based and mobile-optimized opt-in services. Additionally, communities and government agencies have started to communicate information in real-time using social media channels. These formal and informal systems work for those with internet connectivity, but it’s important in approaching any system that is mission-critical to have redundancies, accurate and trusted information, not just conjecture as one might find on social media, fall back systems, and offline touchpoints.

During the fire I experienced, we frantically tuned to the radio in the car hoping to get information, eventually about 50 minutes into our drive, we tuned into KMVR 89.5 (Massive shouts out of respect to them) and it turned out to be the most reliable source of up to date information. And this is not just a California issue it is a national problem that has potentially deadly problems. During the horrific aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Ham radio operators were the sole source of local information and were critical for communities to get information. (https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna9228945)

The Federal Communications Commission's deregulation of radio that started with Regan-era abolishment of the fairness doctrine in 1987 has created a radio-ecosystem in which local markets have been taken over by national conglomerates. Deregulation and monopolies of our broadcast communication companies have made it so that today local broadcasting is a rarity so, even in a crisis it is not possible to get mission-critical information out at the local level. And this needs to change. We cannot rely on private companies and social media for emergency communications, It’s simply too important.

But there is hope. Cal Fire for example has a robust and detailed map that has a zoom level and satellite and terrain view that is to the level that is needed to get to the street level details needed in an emergency evacuation situation. I think this is a good baseline in which to start and with this type of information alone — it’s easy to imagine a broader platform and plan involving online and offline communications that is accessible by design. With all of the users in the ecosystem in mind- easy to input, and understandable output

Create consistency across touch-points

Be accessible by design

Do not assume people have electricity

Design for all the users in the ecosystem — easy to input, understandable output

Work to change deregulation policy.

Climate disaster is the biggest threat we will face in the upcoming decades, Sea rise, drought, and fires will change the entire global landscape and have unavoidable ecologic, economic, and social implications. Throughout the USA climate crisis, disasters are part of more Americans' lives. Fires, floods, extreme heat and cold, hurricanes, and tornadoes are no longer anomalies but seasonal events that affect more people than ever before.

My horror story is one that is just beginning. Floods, fire, and extreme weather are here to stay and will happen more and more each year as our climate changes. This is a story I hope never has or never will happen to you or anyone else but we have to accept the reality of the risk and focus our collective efforts on prevention and mitigation. We need to think more resourcefully and focus our energy on addressing this existential crisis. Through accessible platforms that have redundancies and rebuilding our local broadcast communications infrastructure, we can do this. This is the wicked problem deserving of all our attention.