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244 - Decision making in large-scale evacuations with Erica Kuligowski

March 25, 2026 · 1 h 6 min

Show notes

When one takes a decision to evacuate and starts moving, this is not the end of their decision-making process.

Which route to take? Who to contact? How to arrange a place of shelter? Where to go first? Have I forgotten anything?

I previously discussed the decision-making with Erica Kuligowski from RMIT, and today we're meeting again to follow up on decision-making for large-scale evacuations. We focus on choices and uncertainties that make many of the evacuees take additional trips, and those trips become background traffic that interferes with your escape. In this episode, we dive deep into the decision making in this stage, the sources of data, and hypothesise how this knowledge could be used in practice.

And of course, Erica being one of the leaders of the Human Behaviour in Fire community gives us a high level overview how this part of science looks like, and what is currently being researched.

The HBiF conference we mentioned in the episode can be found here: https://humanbehaviourinfires.se/

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

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