Shouting fire.
Designing for emergencies
My day job is as a designer and professor, but I am here to tell you a horror story today.
It was an ordinary, quiet day this summer in a small, beautiful town near the border between California and Nevada. The town is filled with small quaint shops, hotels, and cafes and is close to world-class skiing. This is 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 due to the pandemic. 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 neighbor's fireplace, but then I couldn’t imagine why someone would use it 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 spotty in the woods, so I drove to the small town near our home to get a signal. I finally could log into my mobile, but I didn’t know where to get information since the incident was so new, and nothing appeared when I searched on Google. As a last resort, I went on NextDoor and turned to Twitter to see if anyone posted anything.
I found 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.
Then, I got a text message that made me feel nauseous. 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 now.
This started a fire that would rage for 11 days and destroy 705 Acres and 21 homes.
My husband and friend 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. The house we were at was different from the 10,488 structures on the 4,257,863 acres that burned in 2020 alone. So many live 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, have access to information through social media, have a computer and a mobile phone, and can evacuate because I have a private automobile. 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 am an aunt. I am interested 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 we must accept that dealing with weather-related emergencies is now a way of life. This is one of the most important design problems to solve, and 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. However, a user interface expresses the thought and consideration a design takes. Good UX also needs to consider technical constraints and opportunities, what's appropriate for the given audience based on the context of its use, and how you want people to traverse information.
Too often, approaches to significant systemic problems focus on the technology and the user interface rather than the broader context in which it will be used and how this piece of the puzzle coexists with other systems. It is tempting to get excited about the GIS or robust push notification system. Still, 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 of 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 social or cultural problems that are 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 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.
We are simultaneously living with two existential crises: the climate crisis and the crisis of income and access inequality. And the two are very related.
And the places where these calamities occur are often the least equipped to deal with them. In the Tubbs Fire of 2017 and the Camp Creek Fire of 2018, communities populated by seniors and low-income households were the most brutal hit. These areas are already economically depressed, subject to public safety power outages, and have challenges in evacuating. There was an evacuation plan in the Paradise fire, but many households were not alerted that their evacuation warning had turned into an evacuation order.
In the last five years, state and local agencies have turned to technology, mainly text-based and mobile-optimized opt-in services. Additionally, communities and government agencies have started communicating real-time information using social media. These formal and informal systems work for those with internet connectivity. Still, it’s essential to approach any mission-critical system with redundancies and accurate and trusted information, not just conjecture, as one might find on social media, fallback 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 KVMR 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 with 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, which started with the Regan-era abolishment of the fairness doctrine in 1987, has created a radio ecosystem in which national conglomerates have taken over local markets. 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 impossible to get mission-critical information out at the regional 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 required in an emergency evacuation situation. This is a good baseline from which to start. With this type of information alone, it’s easy to imagine a broader platform and plan involving online and offline communications that are 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 global landscape and have unavoidable ecologic, economic, and social implications. Throughout the USA climate crisis, disasters have been part of more Americans' lives. Fires, floods, extreme heat, cold, hurricanes, and tornadoes are no longer anomalies but seasonal events affecting more people than ever.
My horror story is just beginning. Floods, fires, 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 a wicked problem deserving of all our attention.
