Prepare to self-rescue

Boulder is adding people without asking how we all get out

You’re in line at the grocery store when it happens. That shrill tone you know from Amber Alerts, every phone in the store going off at once in a near-harmonious cacophony. The cashier stops. Everyone looks down at the same moment. This time it isn’t a missing child. It’s an evacuation order: fire, coming on a west wind.

Then comes the free fall. Your brain floods with adrenaline and cortisol. Your peripheral vision narrows. The part of you that plans and weighs options goes quiet. You look to the people around you. Is this real? What do we do? Disaster researchers call this milling. For a moment, the whole store goes still, as if the temperature of modern life has approached absolute zero. It’s strangely, almost surreally peaceful.

Then there’s a flash of movement. Someone has decided that action beats inaction, and they’re running for their car. The spell breaks, and the primate brain makes its offer: me before you.

And it isn’t just this store. Everyone between the foothills and the highway just got the same alert. All of them are about to head east at the same time, with the same flooded brain.

The wildfire whipped into a frenzy by the wind transforms into an urban conflagration: one that finds a weakness, gets into a neighborhood and burns house to house. Once that happens, the fire holds all the cards while we fight for space on a few roads.

If that sounds far-fetched, we’ve already lived it. About 37,500 people evacuated in three to four hours during the Marshall fire. Boulder County’s own after-action report found the fire “was moving faster than some of the evacuation orders could be developed and launched.” Traffic jammed until police rerouted it. The 911 center was overwhelmed. In Louisville, “the roadways did not have capacity for a city-wide evacuation.”

It has come closer since. This April, at 4 a.m., the Goat Trail fire put residents west of Broadway, from Linden Drive to Sunshine Canyon, under an evacuation warning.

So the thinking, and the math, have to happen before the alert. Instead, we keep adding to the problem.

Look around you. What wasn’t there a few years ago? Boulder is growing on purpose. The new comprehensive plan makes room for up to 40 percent more housing, and the city says we need 10,700 more homes by 2032. I’m not here to argue against housing. I’m here because no one on the Planning Board is willing to ask how new development impacts our evacuation capacity.

That matters more for infill than for the growth that built this town. When Boulder spread outward, its infrastructure grew with it. Infill adds people to the roads we already have. One project now in review would put roughly 400 people on a single site, with one parking space per home. Board members even wanted less parking. On evacuation night, everyone drives what they have, on our streets.

Yet the evacuation question keeps getting lost in our passionate fights over affordability, density and neighborhood character. Those arguments matter, but they sit near the top of Maslow’s pyramid. Getting out alive sits at the bottom. We built a city into the foothills, the climate is changing fast, and the fire season no longer really ends.

I watched that question get lost firsthand. On September 29, I asked the Planning Board, on the record, for a motion requiring an evacuation study for that project on North Broadway. No board member raised evacuation during deliberation. Later that night, they voted unanimously to send the building’s design to an advisory board.

The city has the tools to answer it. The problem is a gap between our resilience goals, our housing goals and our planning decisions. I found no evacuation analysis in the record for this project, and it isn’t clear anyone is responsible for closing that gap.

So here’s a concrete fix. Council should require an evacuation analysis for any development application that rezones land, increases allowed density or adds more than 25 homes. Have an independent engineer model how long it takes to clear the affected area, with this project and everything else already approved nearby, on a bad night. Get Boulder Fire-Rescue and the Office of Disaster Management to sign off in the record, before approval, not after. We already require a flood study before building in a floodplain. This is the same idea.

Until then, don’t wait on the city. Write to council and ask them to adopt that rule. If you’re in the wildfire zone, use the city’s Wildfire Resilience Assistance Program to harden your home. Know two ways out. Know which neighbors will need a hand. And never let your car drop below a quarter tank or a quarter charge.

Because the next time every phone in the grocery store goes off at once, you don’t want to be the one still reading. Prepare to self-rescue. Then go help the people next to you.