As wildfires bore down on neighborhoods across Los Angeles this week, residents and authorities faced a wrenching and almost impossible challenge: convincing hundreds of thousands of people to leave their homes to escape danger, in a matter of hours or even minutes.

In doing so, officials put into practice years’ worth of research into wildfire evacuations. The field is small but growing, reflecting recent studies that suggest the frequency of extreme fires has more than doubled since 2023. The growth has been led by terrible fires in the western United States, Canada, and Russia.

“Definitely the interest [in evacuation research] has increased due to the frequency of wildfire burns,” says Asad Ali, an engineering doctoral student at the North Dakota State University whose work has focused on the field. “We’re seeing more publications, more articles.”

When evacuations go wrong, they really go wrong. In LA’s Pacific Palisades neighborhood, panicked drivers stuck in traffic abandoned their vehicles in the middle of evacuation routes, leaving emergency crews unable to reach the fires. Authorities used bulldozers to push empty cars out of the way.

To prevent this sort of chaos, researchers are attempting to answer some basic but critical questions: Who reacts to what kind of warnings? And when are people most likely to get out of harm’s way?

Many of researchers’ ideas around evacuations come from other sorts of disasters—from studies of residents’ reactions to floods, or nuclear disasters, or volcanic eruptions, and especially hurricanes.

But hurricanes and wildfires differ in some obvious, and less obvious ways. Hurricanes are usually bigger, and affect whole regions, which can require many states and agencies to work together to help people travel longer di...