CITRIS-seeded project helps Bay Area prepare for major wildfires

Screen capture showing a topographical map of Marin County with smoke rising from the southern end.

As wildfires rage in Los Angeles, many San Francisco Bay Area residents are asking themselves if a similar disaster could happen here — and if vulnerable communities are prepared for a rapid evacuation and firefight.

Since 2022, a team of CITRIS-affiliated researchers from UC Berkeley, UC Davis and UC Santa Cruz, led by UC Berkeley’s Kenichi Soga, has been creating highly detailed models of emergency response infrastructure in two Bay Area communities to answer questions like those.

To learn more about wildfire risk in the Bay Area and how simulations and serious games can help the region prepare, UC Berkeley News spoke with Louise Comfort, project co-principal investigator, professor emerita and project scientist with the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

Read more from UC Berkeley News.

Image credit: Screen capture from a prototype of a Bolinas evacuation video game created by UC Davis Professor Thomas Maiorana, showing a plume of wildfire smoke above a map of the Marin County town, courtesy of Paola Lorusso