thoughts on this situation, as someone who works in the field? https://globalnews.ca/news/12003751/bc-man-defied-wildfire-evacuation-order-called-help-fire-grew/
This is a really, really difficult conversation because there is so, so much nuance. Without knowing more about this guy specifically and this fire specifically, I can't speak to this exact incident. But I will happily speak to the phenomenon of holdouts in general!
For clarity: holdouts are anyone who refuses to leave an area during an evacuation, whether it is for a wildfire or otherwise. What rights they have to do this is going to vary depending upon where they are, but we're not going to dig into the laws in this specific post.
Now, firstly, what this article says about holdouts posing a danger to emergency personnel who may have to go back in and get them, and the fact that it can take people away from fighting the fire, is very true. But every situation is going to be so, so different and there is never going to be a clearcut right answer, ESPECIALLY with how fast wildfires can move and how quickly conditions can change.
When talking about holdouts, and evacuations in general, the way we go about it...ah...sucks. It sucks. And it needs to change. These are people's homes, their livelihoods. Many people in the United States in wildfire prone areas no longer have home insurance, or if they do they're massively underinsured, because there is a major crisis with insurance availability in these areas right now. Not sure if Canada is any different, but I'm sure it is still a massively daunting and time consuming process. Not to mention an insurance payout, even if it IS a good one, will never get you back your mementos, your photos, and other one of a kind things. Fighting a fire to defend your home can feel like a less scary, less daunting concept than trying to deal with it burning down, right up until the fire is on your doorstep, and then suddenly it is a lot more real, and losing the house doesn't sound quite so bad when your life is on the line.
For the person making an evacuation call, it can be all to easy to forget these things in the heat of the moment, especially if that person doesn't have good emergency management training. And many don't! At least not on the scale of dealing with evacuating a whole town at the drop of a hat. They may have taken a class or two, done an online training, but they've likely never dealt with anything close to the real deal. And even if they DO have even somewhat good Emergency Management training, they even more rarely have any sort of good public information officer training (and, in my opinion, the standards for "good" PIO training are also dogshit, but that's another post for another day). So their ability to share good information effectively is, at best, also poor. Thus you've frequently got situations where bad information is shared badly and. Well. That's not exactly a recipe for success.
It is also all too easy to just not fully comprehend that what YOU know as a cop/firefighter/whatever is not what the general public knows. It might make sense to evacuate TO YOU. YOU might see all the different little factors that have come together to make evacuation the right call, YOU might fully understand the risks, YOU might know what support systems are going to show up to help the people you're telling to evacuate. But the people you're telling to evacuate by and large DON'T know those things. It's literally the XKCD comic:
On top of all of that, evacuation decisions are NOT easy to make, especially for wildfires. Wildfires can move so fast, and so erratically (especially in urban environments), that planning for a mass evacuation can sometimes be straight up impossible. You don't know where that fire is going to go, what routes might get cut off, what routes could get clogged up. Sometimes, it isn't just an evacuation decision, it is a decision on where you want people to die. Do you leave them spread out in their individual homes and hope that gives more people more of a chance to make it through, or do you concentrate them all onto the roads and hope like hell that road doesn't get impacted by the fire and kill everyone in one spot? Especially in towns with limited roads in and out, it can be an impossible decision to make.
THEN there's the fact that the way we handle wildfires has changed so, so much in the last 60-70ish years. Fighting wildfires used to be much more community based. Everyone pitched in somehow. Men fought the fire, women helped run the camp, teenagers did odd jobs, little kids ran messages. There were specialized teams that came in from out of the area to help, but not to the level we have today where the outside teams fully take over and straight up disallow much, if any, local assistance or support.
Now we're at a point in time where wildfires aren't really handled by their local community, but more and more communities are experiencing wildfires, and experiencing them in ways that used to be much, much rarer. So they don't know how to handle it as well, because they're not familiar with fire. But the teams that are coming in also don't know how to handle it as well, because they're not familiar with the community, just the fire. It's a very obnoxious little Catch-22.
When you put all of this together, the phenomenon of holdouts makes sense, I think. People just want to protect their homes, they may not feel like they have any safety net if they lose their homes, information sharing about evacuation necessity isn't great, evacuations can be dangerous in and of themselves, and the way wildfires are managed now is much different than it used to be. Then the reality comes crashing down on their heads as soon as the fire crests the hill, and they realize there's a very good chance they are about to die.
And sometimes it's none of that. Sometimes people are just stubborn or obstinate.
So what's the answer here? I honestly don't know. I think the whole system needs overhauled, but that's something that takes time, and fire season is now so bad and so constant we don't have the time.
At the end of the day, we can't save everyone, no matter how hard we try. And that sucks. Sometimes the answer is going to be better evacuation information and options. Sometimes it's going to be firefighters asking a holdout who to call to pick up their body at the morgue later to shock them into leaving. Sometimes it's going to be better resources and training for homeowners who do want to stay. Sometimes it is going to be going in to rescue people. And sometimes people are still going to die.
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