With $2.5 million from the National Science Foundation, an interdisciplinary, multicampus University of California research team is partnering with agencies and community organizations in the Bay Area to help residents respond to natural disasters more quickly — and more safely.
The 2018 Camp Fire, which killed 85 people and laid waste to more than 240 square miles of Butte County in Northern California, was the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in the state’s history.
Building on a Seed Funding project from the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society and the Banatao Institute (CITRIS), with significant support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), researchers from the University of California (UC) are taking lessons learned from the Camp Fire and other disasters and applying their expertise in complex systems modeling, risk management and human-computer interaction to mitigate future tragedies in hazard-prone communities.
The NSF has awarded $2.5 million, co-funded by its Smart & Connected Communities and Advancing Informal STEM Learning programs, to a team of engineers, policy scholars and design experts at the UC campuses in Berkeley, Davis and Santa Cruz.
Led by Kenichi Soga, the Donald H. McLaughlin Chair in Mineral Engineering and Chancellor’s Professor at UC Berkeley, the researchers will use the grant over three years to develop an interdisciplinary framework to simulate wildfire evacuation methods in two Bay Area communities — Marin County and the city of Oakland in Alameda County — and to educate community members on how to escape wildfires safely.
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