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What happens when you can’t run and you can’t hide?
You did everything right.
You had your go-bag ready and you knew your evacuation route. You monitored the wildfire as it moved closer and closer to your home, and you kept the volume turned up on your phone so you could heed a “LEAVE NOW” notice if one came. When it finally does, jolting you awake in the middle of the night, you realize that you can smell the smoke inside. When did the fire get so close?
The power is out, so you make your way downstairs using your phone’s flashlight. You have to Google how to manually open the garage door since the electronic clicker doesn’t work (oh, so that’s what the red cord is for). Your heart is thumping, but you’ve made it, you’re in your car; you even remembered to keep it filled to half a tank in preparation. You pull out of your driveway and onto the dirt road that leads out of your rural neighborhood. The night sky ahead of you is a weird neon orange.
You have to hit your brakes when you reach the intersection at the main road. It’s completely backed up with other evacuees, their red taillights stretching ahead through the thickening smoke as far as your eye can see. Some of your neighbors are pulling their boats on trailers; there is an RV up ahead. And you can see the fire burning down the side of the hill now — toward you, toward the gridlocked traffic that isn’t moving.
Harrowing Fort McMurray wildfire escapeyoutu.be
Leaving your home is only the beginning of a wildfire evacuation. But the next step — the drive to a safe location — is usually given no more attention in preparedness guides than the reminder to “follow the directions of emergency officials.” In the best-case scenarios, where communication is clear and early and residents are prepared, that might be enough. But when communication breaks down, or fires move fast and unpredictably, traffic can reach a dangerous standstill and familiar roads can transform into death traps.
In 2015, some 20 vehicles were overcome by a fire while stuck in a traffic jam on Interstate 15 between Los Angeles and Las Vegas; on the same interstate in Utah five years later, a backup nearly became deadly as a fire burned up to the road’s shoulder and panicked travelers abandoned their cars. Fire evacuations in New South Wales, Australia, in 2020 resulted in a 10-hour backup, and Canada’s Highway 3 had bumper-to-bumper traffic earlier this month because it was the only road out of imperiled Yellowknife. In 2020, some 200 people had to be evacuated by helicopter from California’s Sierra National Forest after a fire cut off their only exit route.
And when people die in wildfires, they are often found in their vehicles. In Portugal, 47 of the 64 people killed during a 2017 forest fire were in their cars, trying to escape. At least 10 people were found dead in or near their cars after the 2018 Camp fire, the deadliest blaze in California’s history. And in Lahaina, Hawaii, this month, in what the Los Angeles Times has called “surely … the deadliest traffic jam in U.S. history,” the lack of advanced warning combined with inexplicably blocked roads led an untold number of people to perish in their cars while trying to evacuate, including a 7-year-old boy who was fleeing with his family; a man who used his last moments attempting to shield a beloved golden retriever in his hatchback; and a couple who were reportedly found in each other’s arms.
In a best-case scenario, emergency managers are able to phase evacuations in such a way that the roads don’t get backed up and residents have plenty of time to make it to safety. But wildfire is anything but predictable, and officials who call for an evacuation too soon can risk skeptical residents deciding to take a “wait and see” approach, where they only get in their car once things start to look dicey. In one 2017 study, only a quarter of people in wildfire-prone neighborhoods actually left as soon as they received an evacuation notice (other studies have found higher levels of compliance). This is the worst nightmare from an emergency management standpoint, since “evacuating at the last minute is probably the most dangerous thing you can do,” Sarah McCaffrey, one of the 2017 study’s authors, told The New Yorker.
Further complicating matters is the fact that many wildfire-prone areas are isolated or rural regions with a limited number of egresses to work with. One 2019 investigation found that in California alone, 350,000 people live in areas “that have both the highest wildfire risk designation, and either the same number or fewer exit routes per person as Paradise” — the site of the 2018 Camp fire, where backups on roads prevented many from escaping.
Evacuation traffic also doesn’t behave like the rush hour traffic we’re more familiar with. It’s “a peak of a peak,” with the congestion caused by “the sheer amount of people trying to leave and load onto the roadway at the same time in the same direction,” Stephen Wong, a wildfire evacuation researcher and an assistant professor of transportation engineering at the University of Alberta, told me. Burnovers and hazards like downed powerlines or trees can further reduce exit options, funneling all evacuees onto the same low-capacity roads. Worse, once that congestion starts to form, “you actually reduce the number of vehicles being able to go through that section,” Wong added. “So you go from 2,000 vehicles per hour [per lane], and it drops to, like, 500 vehicles per hour.”
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Households will also frequently evacuate with multiple cars — rather than leave a valuable asset behind to burn — and tow trailers, boats, and RVs. As a result, the average vehicle length increases by 3% during wildfire evacuations, one recent study that looked at the 2019 Kincade fire in California found — leading, of course, to even worse congestion. (Agonizingly, Wong’s research further uncovered that over half of evacuating households “had at least two or more spare seats available”). The Kincade study also discovered that drivers significantly slow down during wildfire evacuations — contrary to the common misconception of careening, panicked escapees — likely due to a combination of factors such as lowered visibility and more cautious driving.
Because “most [evacuation] research focuses on hurricanes and then tornadoes,” Salman Ahmad, a traffic engineer at the civil engineering firm Fleis & VandenBrink, told me, “traffic simulations — how traffic moves during a wildfire — are still lacking.” When emergency planners use computer models to calculate minimum evacuation times for their jurisdictions, for example, their assumptions can be deadly. “If you plan for an allocation considering normal traffic as a benchmark, you’re basically not making the right assumption because you need to put in that extra safety margin” to account for “the fact that people slow down,” Enrico Ronchi, a fire researcher at Lund University in Sweden and the author of the Kincade study, told me.
Wong agreed, stressing that the number of variables fire managers need to juggle is dizzying. “Evacuations are really complex events that involve human behavior, risk perceptions, communication, emergency management, operations, the transportation system itself, psychology, the built environment, and biophysical fire,” Wong said. “So we have a long way to go for evidence-based and sufficient planning that can actually operationalize and prepare communities for these types of events.”
And that’s the scary thing: A person or a community might do everything right and still be at grave risk because of all the unknowns. Evacuation alerts might not get sent or arrive too late; exit routes might become unexpectedly blocked; fires might leapfrog, via flying embers, to create new spot fires that cut off egresses. Paradise, California, famously had a phased evacuation plan in place and had even run community wildfire drills, but even the best-laid plans can unravel.
Tom Cova, a geography professor at the University of Utah who has been studying wildfire evacuations for 30 years, told me that “too many communities may be planning for the roads to be open, the wireless emergency alert systems to work, there not to be tons of kids at home that day — you can just go down the list of things that [could go] wrong and think, What’s the backup plan?” The uncomfortable truth is that we need plans B, C, and D for when evacuations fail. Because they will fail.
Take Lahaina, where a closed bypass road concentrated outbound traffic onto a single, jam-packed street. When people started to panic and abandon their cars, it ultimately further obstructed the road for everyone behind them. “It’s like a chain reaction, where each car is seeing the [people in the] car in front of them run,” Cova said. “And then you look behind you, you can’t back up. If you look to the sides, you’re stuck. And then you say, ‘We’re going into the ocean, too.’”
That improvisation ultimately saved some lives. But “it’s hard for emergency managers to order this kind of thing because what if people drowned?” Cova went on. “So you’re trading one risk for another risk.”
But the need for creative improvisation is also a conclusion that’s been reached by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the government agency tasked with issuing guidelines and regulations for engineers and emergency responders. In new guidance released last week, NIST used the Camp fire as its case study and found “evacuation is not a universal solution,” explaining there are times when “it may be better for residents to shelter in their community at a designated safety zone” rather than attempt to drive out of town.
This is a somewhat radical position for a U.S. agency since evacuations have long been the foundation of American wildfire preparations. But the thinking now appears to be turning toward asking “what shelters do we have?” if and when a worst-case scenario arises, as Cova further explained to me. “Temporary refuge areas, high schools, churches, large parking lots, large sports fields, golf courses, swimming pools — I wouldn’t recommend using any of these things, and I wouldn’t recommend people being told to use them,” he said, “but [people] have to know what to do when they can’t get out.”
In the case of Paradise, for example, NIST reports that there were 31 such “temporary refuge areas” that ultimately saved 1,200 lives during the fire, including 14 parking lots, seven roadways, six structures, and a handful of defensible natural areas, like a pre-established wildfire assembly area in a meadow that had already burned and ended up serving as a refuge for as many as 85 people. Once established, these concentrated refuge areas can be defended by firefighters, as was the case for 150 people who memorably hunkered down to wait out the blaze in a strip mall parking lot. It’s far from a best-case scenario, but that’s still 150 people who would’ve otherwise been stuck in potentially deadly traffic jams trying to get out of town.
Temporary refuges are unplanned areas of last resort, but establishing a larger safety zone network and preemptively hardening gathering places like schools and community centers could also potentially reduce exposure on roads by shortening the distance evacuees need to travel to get to lower-hazard areas. So-called WUI fire shelters — essentially, personal fire bunkers that NIST warns against because they aren’t standardized in the U.S. but are popular in Australia — could also be explored. “That’s the direction we’re heading in with wildfire communities,” Cova told me grimly, “because we don’t seem to be able to stop the development in these areas. That means we’re forcing people into a corner where shelter is their only backup plan.”
Maybe this is difficult for you to imagine: Your community is different; a wildfire couldn’t happen here. You’d evacuate as soon as you got the notice; there’s no way you’d get stuck. You’re a good driver; you could get out without help. But as Lahaina and other “unprecedented” fires show, it’s the limits of our lived experiences that we’re up against now.
“We should think about possible scenarios that we have not seen before in our communities,” Ronchi, the Swedish fire researcher, said. “I understand that it’s a bit of a challenge for everyone because often you have to invest money for something that you have not experienced directly. But we are [living] in scenarios now in which we cannot anchor ourselves on our past experiences only.”
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Just about every other renewable energy company is taking a beating today.
American solar manufacturer First Solar may be the big winner from the slew of tariffs Donald Trump announced yesterday against the world’s trading partners. Sorry, make that basically the only winner among renewable energy companies.
In a note to clients this morning, Jefferies analyst Julien Dumoulin-Smith wrote that “in this inflationary environment, we expect FSLR's domestic manufacturing to be the clear winner” in the long term.
For everyone else in the renewable industry — for example, an equipment manufacturer like inverter company Enphase, which has been trying to move its activities away from China — “we perceive all costs to head higher, contributing to a wider inflation narrative.”
First Solar’s’s stock is up almost 4% in early trading as the broader market reels from the global tariffs. Throughout the rest of the solar ecosystem, there’s a sea of red. Enphase is down almost 8%. Chinese inverter manufacturer Sungrow is down 7%. Solar installer Sunrun’s shares are down over 10%. The whole S&P 500 is down 4%, while independent power producers such as Vistra and Constellation and turbine manufacturer GE Vernova are down around 10% as expected power demand has fallen.
First Solar “is currently the largest domestic manufacturer of solar panels and is in the midst of expanding its domestic manufacturing footprint, which should serve as a competitive advantage over its peers,” Morgan Stanley analyst Andrew Perocco wrote in a note to clients Thursday morning.
Nor has First Solar been afraid to fight for its position in the global economy. It ispart of a coalition of American solar manufacturers that have been demanding protections against Southeast Asian solar exporters, claiming that they are part of a scheme by Chinese companies to avoid preexisting solar tariffs. In 2023,80% of American solar imports came from Southeast Asia, according to Reuters.
Tariff rates specific to solar components manufactured in those countries will likely be finalized later this month. Those will come in addition to the new tariffs, which will go into effect on April 9.
But the biggest question about First Solar — and the American renewables industry as a whole — remains unanswered: the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act. The company benefits both from tax credits for advanced manufacturing and investment and production tax credits for solar power.
“Government incentive programs, such as the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 (the “IRA”), have contributed to this momentum by providing solar module manufacturers, project developers, and project owners with various incentives to accelerate the deployment of solar power generation,” the company wrote in a recent securities filing.
If those tax credits are at risk, then First Solar may not be a winner so much as the fastest runner ahead of an advancing tide.
On once-in-a-lifetime bad weather, Trump tariffs, and Tesla’s shares
Current conditions: A heat wave triggered power cuts in Kuwait as electricity demand exceeded capacity • Australia just rounded out its 12 hottest months ever recorded • Temperatures in New York City are forecast to reach 73 degrees Fahrenheit today, nearly 30 degrees higher than yesterday.
Powerful thunderstorms are tearing across the Midwest and Mississippi Valley in what the National Weather Service has warned will be a “multi-day catastrophic and potentially historic” event. Destructive and deadly tornadoes were reported overnight in multiple states including Missouri, Arkansas, Kentucky, and Indiana. The system also brought a threat of once-in-a-lifetime flooding caused by heavy rainfall. More than 1.4 million people were under flash flood warnings. “This isn’t routine,” the National Weather Service in Memphis, Tennessee, warned. “This is a rare, high-impact, and potentially devastating event.” The storm is expected to stall over the region and continue to dump heavy rain – up to 12 inches in some areas – through the rest of the week.
NOAA
As Heatmap’s Jeva Lange has reported, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is highly confident in the attributable influence of climate change on extreme rain, and “everything we know about thunderstorms suggests that a warmer, wetter atmosphere will mean severe convection storms become both more frequent and more intense.” These historic spring storms are hitting as the Trump administration slashes jobs at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, hampering the government’s ability to effectively forecast and respond to weather emergencies.
President Trump on Wednesday announced sweeping 10% baseline tariffs on imported goods, as well as higher “reciprocal” tariffs against about 60 countries that impose charges and other trade barriers on U.S. products. China will be hit with a 34% reciprocal fee, on top of Trump’s existing 20% tariffs on Chinese goods, bringing the overall rate to 54%. The European Union will be hit with 20% reciprocal tariffs; India 26%; South Korea 25%; Japan 24%, and Vietnam 46%. The full list is here.
The newly announced levies exclude imported energy commodities such as crude oil, natural gas, and refined products. “The exemption will come as a relief to the U.S. oil industry, which had expressed concerns that new levies could disrupt flows and raise costs,” Reutersnoted. Meanwhile, high reciprocal tariffs on goods from southeast Asia mean higher prices for solar panels, “another potential dent to the clean energy buildout by a president keen to boost fossil fuels,” according toBloomberg. Trump’s 25% tariffs on auto imports also come into effect today, a move expected to hike car prices for American consumers.
Tesla’s shares have been on a rollercoaster ride over the last 24 hours, falling by about 6% on weak quarterly EV sales, then rebounding on a report that CEO Elon Musk plans to step away from his role within the Trump administration. The electric vehicle company delivered 336,681 cars in the first quarter of 2025, far below analyst expectations of 390,000. The results are the company’s weakest since 2022, a further sign of curdling consumer sentiment as Musk spearheads unpopular mass firings across multiple federal agencies as head of the Department of Government Efficiency. On Wednesday, Politicoreported that President Trump has been telling his Cabinet that Musk will soon “return to his businesses and take on a supporting role” within the administration. The White House denied the report, but the rumor seemed to buoy Tesla’s stock market position, with pre-market shares up about 5% on Thursday.
A group of 16 Republican state legislators on Wednesday sent a letter to Energy Secretary Chris Wright asking him not to pull the plug on funding for seven nascent hydrogen hubs dotted across the country. The Department of Energy is reportedly thinking about cutting $4 billion in funding for the hubs, which were approved under the Biden administration in an effort to turn hydrogen into a viable fossil fuel alternative. The GOP lawmakers urge Wright to preserve funding for the Pacific Northwest Hydrogen Hub in particular, pitching it as a boost to manufacturing, energy independence, and domestic economic growth. Senate Democrats sent their own letter to Wright on Wednesday slamming the contemplated hydrogen hub defunding. “Indiscriminately canceling program funding and executed contracts, and refusing to execute on the funding directives Congress enacted, neither honors existing agreements nor is consistent with the spending laws that have appropriated funding for specific purposes,” the Democrats wrote.
Global coal-fired power capacity additions in 2024 were at their lowest level in 20 years, according to a new report from the Global Energy Monitor. The drop signals an ongoing slowdown in coal use as renewables come online, but the fleet is still growing, especially in China and India. China’s 30.5 gigawatts of newly commissioned coal power capacity last year accounted for 70% of the global total. Meanwhile, India recorded more new coal proposals than ever before. Coal is one of the dirtiest fossil fuels, accounting for 40% to 45% of global energy-related carbon dioxide emissions.
Global Energy Monitor
Montana’s Colstrip power plant, which produces more fine particulate emissions than any other coal-burning plant in the United States, has asked President Trump for an exemption from the Environmental Protection Agency’s air pollution standards.
While you were watching Florida and Wisconsin, voters in Naperville, Illinois were showing up to fight coal.
It’s probably fair to say that not that many people paid close attention to last night’s city council election in Naperville, Illinois. A far western suburb of Chicago, the city is known for its good schools, small-town charm, and lovely brick-paved path along the DuPage River. Its residents tend to vote for Democrats. It’s not what you would consider a national bellwether.
Instead, much of the nation’s attention on Tuesday night focused on the outcomes of races in Wisconsin and Florida — considered the first electoral tests of President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s popularity. Outside of the 80,000 or so voters who cast ballots in Naperville, there weren’t likely many outsiders watching the suburb’s returns.
But for clean energy and environmental advocates, the Naperville city council results represent an encouraging, if overlooked, victory. On Tuesday, voters in the suburb elected four candidates — incumbents Benjamin White and Ian Holzhauer, and newcomers Mary Gibson and Ashfaq Syed — all of whom oppose the city signing a new contract with the Prairie State Generating Station, the state’s largest and youngest coal-fired plant and the seventh-dirtiest electricity provider in the country.
Naperville is one of 30 municipal investors in the Prairie State plant whose contract with the Illinois Municipal Electric Agency, a public power agency and one of the nine partial owners of Prairie State, has it locked into coal through 2035. Recently, IMEA approached the municipal investors with the promise of favorable terms on a new contract if the cities and towns were willing to re-sign a decade early — by April 30 — and commit to another 20 years of coal power. Most municipalities took the deal, which will run through 2055; Naperville, along with the towns of St. Charles and Winnetka, are still debating the decision, with the deadline looming.
“IMEA’s proposition for communities is, ‘Hey, instead of paying Wall Street and shareholder dividends, we don’t have any of that because we’re a nonprofit, so you get lower energy costs,’” Fernando Arriola, the community relations chair for Naperville Environment and Sustainability Task Force, which opposes the deal with IMEA, told me. “But the way I look at it is, it’s a deal with the devil because you’re locked in for 30 years. And it’s like Hotel California — you can check in anytime you like, but you can never leave.”
In a statement to Heatmap, Staci Wilson, the vice president of government affairs and member services at IMEA, told me that the contract it offered to Naperville is “designed to help … secure more future green resources to serve our member communities for the long term. IMEA is the only power supplier to allow the city to have a direct voice in procuring their wholesale power supply and make reliable, economical, and sustainable resource decisions for the future.”
While it’s true that IMEA allows its municipal members a voice in its future planning, those in Naperville who oppose the new contract point out that the community has just one vote in the process despite making up 35% of the utility’s market.
The pending contract decision became one of the major themes of the city council race in Naperville — attention that caused some locals to grumble about the injection of partisan politics and outside interest in the campaigns. But Syed, a newly elected city council member and a recent immigrant from Dubai, told me that learning that his city relied on coal for 80% of its energy needs was what ultimately galvanized him into running. “Naperville has been a leader in many things, but in this area, we were not doing good,” he said. “So I stepped up.”
Illinois has one of the nation’s most aggressive decarbonization timelines, requiring coal and gas plants to close by 2030. But there is a carve-out for plants owned by public entities like municipal utilities or rural electric cooperatives, and Prairie State fits that bill. Instead, the power plant has to reduce emissions by 45% by 2038, a goal IMEA says it can reach by installing multi-billion dollar carbon capture and storage technologies. Energy experts have been widely skeptical of the proposal. “The people I’ve talked to say that’s unproven and it doesn’t necessarily work, and it’s a high price,” Arriola said.
Still, cost concerns related to transitioning away from coal had “definitely been a conversation in town” leading up to Tuesday’s election, Arriola told me. “A lot of people are seriously concerned about pricing, and there are also concerns about the reliability.” Syed told me that was one of the objections he heard the most when talking to constituents during his campaign. “Some of the Republicans who were against [exporing alternative energy options] were trying to influence people, saying we need to think about the cost,” he said. “My standard answer to these people was that I am not going to compromise clean energy just for the cost purpose.”
Perhaps most interestingly, unlike many communities that oppose power plants, Naperville is located almost 300 miles north of the Prairie State Generating Station and is unaffected by its immediate pollution. Naperville voters who opposed renewing the contract did so on the merits of finding cleaner energy sources and on the objection to dirty electricity that is otherwise out of sight and out of mind. As Amanda Pankau, the director of energy and community resiliency at the Prairie Rivers Network, an environmental nonprofit in the state, told me, “From a climate perspective, we should all care about the Prairie State coal plant.” She noted that the emissions from the plant — around 12.4 million tons of carbon dioxide a year — are “impacting every single Illinoisan and every single person that lives on planet Earth.”
Despite those existential stakes, it could be tempting to wave away the results in Naperville as being on trend for a relatively affluent and liberal-leaning town. Compared to the Wisconsin supreme court election, where the Democrat-backed candidate overcame enormous spending margins to trounce her Republican-backed opponent, it does not necessarily indicate the same momentum for the party heading into 2026’s midterms. (Nor does it even have the biggest climate-related election headline of the night: Tesla is suing Wisconsin for a law preventing car manufacturers from owning car dealerships, which the state’s high court will likely decide.)
But at a time of little good news in the climate sphere, the Naperville election is an encouraging and invigorating reminder that there are candidates who believe in cleaner technologies, and that the battles can still — or especially — be won at the local level. “Twenty-five or 30 years ago, the IMEA contract we signed for that time was okay,” Syed said. “But it’s not okay today. We cannot have this $2 billion contract until 2055 because the next generation will ask us this question: ‘What have you people done for us this time?’”