Follow Up – What is Your Clearance Evacuation Time?

Stunning defeat of the 2424 Garden of the Gods Road rezoning issue before City Council on August 24, 2021. Fire evacuation was a hot topic and debated throughout the meeting.

Over the weekend the community was challenged to communicate with the mayor, city council and county commissioners about clearance evacuation times and the safety of citizens residing in the Wildland Urban Interface (WUI).

In addition to a mailer, video, articles, rally and multiple pleas, Westside Watch, the Mountain Shadows Community Association and The Maverick Observer collectively requested citizens to contact their city councilmembers and voice concerns about public safety and evacuation times and routes.

The last time a full study was completed was in 2010, which showed that volume-to-capacity evacuation routes exceeded the one-hour standard to evacuate for almost all the property within the WUI. During the 2012 Waldo Canyon Fire, it took longer than four hours to evacuate the neighborhoods due to chokepoints and only four roads out.

Public Safety Discussion at City Council Work Session

During Monday’s City Council Work Session, an item, “Public Safety Evacuation Process Discussion,” was orchestrated to include Fire Chief Randy Royal, Police Chief Vince Niski, and OEM Director Jim Reid that indicated plans are in place to address a safe evacuation during a disaster event. 

The Mountain Shadows Neighborhood and Westside Watch rallied outside the City Council Work Session to protest the rezoning of the property known as 2424 Garden of the Gods Road and the lack of public safety criteria and evacuation planning.  A mobile billboard was created to inform the public about the lack of appropriate evacuation plans in the city; specifically, as it pertains to the continued infill and proposed development within the WUI.

What does Florida do instead of California?

The Fire Chief indicated in a few weeks the city will evaluate a software program used in California to model evacuation. The software program is Zonehaven. It’s critical with the exponential growth and proposed development within the WUI that every homeowner is provided an evacuation map or access to a map to understand and know their evacuation routes. 

For example, disaster preparedness maps for Florida’s coastal counties, which are susceptible to storm surge from tropical storms and hurricanes, are provided for every address.  Take a look at the following link and ask yourself why our city leadership can’t provide something similar while claiming access to evacuation routes and maps are a matter of top security: https://www.floridadisaster.org/planprepare/disaster-preparedness-maps/.

Zonehaven vs. FLEET

During Tuesday’s city council meeting, John McLain, former CIO of a major international telecommunications corporation and a holder of 6 of the 13 patents involving simulation modeling, eloquently discussed the difference between FLEET and Zonehaven as a software solution for our modeling challenge.

Zonehaven is not an evacuation simulation. It is an emergency management tool designed to provide better gathering and application of information to produce safer evacuations. Tools like this are important, and it’s surprising that a city the size of Colorado Springs with our fire history doesn’t already have a system like this as they aren’t new. 

However, it does NOT calculate clearance times — it isn’t designed to do this — the information must be provided from another source. Wildfires are complex with many influencing variables. Where and how fast they spread can be extremely difficult to predict and does depend on factors like the weather to evaluate plume directions, but you only have one road network which is a fixed variable.  There is a predetermined number of roadways and cars that those roadways can sustain which is why advanced evacuation modeling is so helpful and routinely done for various emergencies like nuclear meltdowns, hurricanes, and fires.

Evacuation simulations model that road network and easily take into consideration impacts of road closures or reductions in capacity due to smoke, debris, construction, etc. This allows the simulations to test many different scenarios. Running evacuation simulations to forecast traffic in different scenarios is reasonable – and easy. Like RtePM which preceded it, FLEET allows testing many different scenarios quickly and accurately. And it’s free.

City Council Decision on Rezoning 2424 Garden of the Gods Road

The city council voted 5-4 against rezoning citing safety, health, density, and housing affordability as major concerns.

Councilmembers Dave Donelson, Nancy Henjum, Bill Murray, Richard Skorman, and Tom Strand voted against the rezoning.

Continue to Keep Colorado Springs Beautiful and Safe

City leadership heard our voices and recognized the incredible support for our neighbors. We believe in development and the need for affordable housing in our city, but not at the expense of our safety.

Our research and fight are not over. After the two devastating fires in 2012 and 2013, the city leadership did not significantly change their attitude for developing and building within the WUI. They are still a great disappointment to our citizens and community.

Now comes the hard part – changing a developer culture into a citizen culture with new zoning requirements to keep our WUI beautiful and properly developed.

The Maverick Observer, or “The Moe” as we affectionately call it, is an online free-thinking publication interested in the happenings in our town. We launched in February 2020 to hold our politicians and businesses accountable. We hope to educate, inform, entertain, and infuse you with a sense of community.