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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.”
Read more about wildfires:
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Rob and Jesse talk with John Henry Harris, the cofounder and CEO of Harbinger Motors.
You might not think that often about medium-duty trucks, but they’re all around you: ambulances, UPS and FedEx delivery trucks, school buses. And although they make up a relatively small share of vehicles on the road, they generate an outsized amount of carbon pollution. They’re also a surprisingly ripe target for electrification, because so many medium-duty trucks drive fewer than 150 miles a day.
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse talk with John Henry Harris, the cofounder and CEO of Harbinger Motors. Harbinger is a Los Angeles-based startup that sells electric and hybrid chassis for medium-duty vehicles, such as delivery vans, moving trucks, and ambulances.
Rob, John, and Jesse chat about why medium-duty trucking is unlike any other vehicle segment, how to design an electric truck to last 20 years, and how President Trump’s tariffs are already stalling out manufacturing firms. Shift Key is hosted by Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University, and Robinson Meyer, Heatmap’s executive editor.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: What is it like building a final assembly plant — a U.S. factory — in this moment?
John Harris: I would say lots of people talk about how excited they are about U.S. manufacturing, but that's very different than putting their money where their mouth is. Building a final assembly line, like we have — our team here is really good, that they made it feel not that hard. The challenge is the whole supply chain.
If we look at what we build here in-house at Harbinger, we have a final assembly line where we bolt parts together to make chassis. We also have two sub-component assembly lines where we take copper and make motors, and where we take cells and make batteries. All three of those lines work pretty well. We're pumping out chassis, and they roll out the door, and we sell them to people, which is great. But it’s all the stuff that goes into those, that's the most challenging. There's a lot of trade policy at certain hours of the day, on certain days of the week — depending on when we check — that is theoretically supposed to encourage us manufacturing.
But it's really not because of the volatility. It costs us an enormous amount to build the supply chain, to feed these lines. And when we have volatile trade policy, our reaction, and everyone else's reaction, is to just pause. It’s not to spend more money on U.S. manufacturing, because we were already doing that. We were spending a lot on U.S. manufacturing as part of our core approach to manufacturing.
The latest trade policy has caused us to spend less money on U.S. manufacturing — not more, because we're unclear on what is the demand environment going to be, what is the policy going to be next week? We were getting ready to make major investments to take certain manufacturing tasks in our supply chain out of China and move them to Mexico, for example. Now we’re not. We were getting ready to invest in certain kinds of automation to do things in house, and now we're waiting. So the volatility is dramatically shrinking investment in US manufacturing, including ours.
Meyer: And can you just explain, why did you make that decision to pause investment and how does trade policy affect that decision?
Harris: When we had 25% tariffs on China, if we take content out of China and move it to Mexico, we break even — if that. We might still end up underwater. That's because there's better automation in China. There's much higher labor productivity. And — this one is always shocking to people — there’s lower logistics costs. When we move stuff from Shenzhen to our factory, in many cases it costs us less than moving shipments from Monterey.
Mentioned:
CalStart’s data on medium-duty electric trucks deployed in the U.S.
Here’s the chart that John showed Rob and Jesse:
Courtesy of Harbinger
It draws on data from Bloomberg in China, the ICCT, and the Calstart ZET Dashboard in the United States.
Jesse’s case for EVs with gas tanks — which are called extended range electric vehicles
On xAI, residential solar, and domestic lithium
Current conditions: Indonesia has issued its highest alert level due to the ongoing eruption of Mount Lewotobi Laki-laki • 10 million people from Missouri to Michigan are at risk of large hail and damaging winds today • Tropical Storm Erick, the earliest “E” storm on record in the eastern Pacific Ocean, could potentially strengthen into a major hurricane before making landfall near Acapulco, Mexico, on Thursday.
The NAACP and the Southern Environmental Law Center said Tuesday that they intend to sue Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI over alleged Clean Air Act violations at its Memphis facility. Per the lawsuit, xAI failed to obtain the required permits for the use of the 26 gas turbines that power its supercomputer, and in doing so, the company also avoided equipping the turbines with technology that would have reduced emissions. “xAI’s turbines are collectively one of the largest, or potentially the largest, industrial source of nitrogen oxides in Shelby County,” the lawsuit claims.
The SELC has additionally said that residents who live near the xAI facility already face cancer risks four times above the national average, and opponents have argued that xAI’s lack of urgency in responding to community concerns about the pollution is a case of “environmental racism.” In a statement Tuesday, xAI responded to the threat of a lawsuit by claiming the “temporary power generation units are operating in compliance with all applicable laws,” and said it intends to equip the turbines with the necessary technology to reduce emissions going forward.
Shares of several residential solar companies plummeted Tuesday after the Senate Finance Committee declined to preserve related Inflation Reduction Act investment tax credits. As my colleague Matthew Zeitlin reported, Sunrun shares fell 40%, “bringing the company’s market cap down by almost $900 million to $1.3 billion,” after a brief jump at the end of last week “due to optimism that the Senate Finance bill might include friendlier language for its business model.”
That never materialized. Instead, the Finance Committee’s draft proposed terminating the residential clean energy tax credit for any systems, including residential solar, six months after the bill is signed, as well as the investment and production tax credits for residential solar. SolarEdge and Enphase also suffered from the news, with shares down 33% and 24%, respectively. You can read Matthew’s full analysis here.
Chevron announced Tuesday that it has acquired 125,000 net acres of the Smackover Formation in southwest Arkansas and northeast Texas to get into domestic lithium extraction. Chevron’s acquisition follows an earlier move by Exxon Mobil to do the same, with lithium representing a key resource for the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources “that would allow the company to pivot if oil and gas demands wane in the coming decades,” Bloomberg writes.
“Establishing domestic and resilient lithium supply chains is essential not only to maintaining U.S. energy leadership but also to meeting the growing demand from customers,” Jeff Gustavson, the president of Chevron New Energies, said in a Tuesday press release. The Liberty Owl project, which was part of Chevron’s acquisition from TerraVolta Resources, is “expected to have an initial production capacity of at least 25,000 tonnes of lithium carbonate per year, which is enough lithium to power about 500,000 electric vehicles annually,” Houston Business Journal reports.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency prepared a memo titled “Abolishing FEMA” at the direction of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, describing how its functions can be “drastically reformed, transferred to another agency, or abolished in their entirety” as soon as the end of 2025. While only Congress can technically eliminate the agency, the March memo, obtained and reviewed by Bloomberg, describes potential changes like “eliminating long-term housing assistance for disaster survivors, halting enrollments in the National Flood Insurance Program, and providing smaller amounts of aid for fewer incidents — moves that by design would dramatically limit the federal government’s role in disaster response.”
In May, FEMA’s acting administrator, Cameron Hamilton, was fired one day after defending the existence of the department he’d been appointed to oversee when testifying before the House Appropriations subcommittee. An internal FEMA memo from the same month described the agency’s “critical functions” as being at “high risk” of failure due to “significant personnel losses in advance of the 2025 Hurricane Season.” President Trump has, on several occasions, expressed a desire to eliminate FEMA, as recommended by the Project 2025 playbook from the Heritage Foundation. The March “Abolishing FEMA” memo “just means you should not expect to see FEMA on the ground unless it’s 9/11, Katrina, Superstorm Sandy,” Carrie Speranza, the president of the U.S. council of the International Association of Emergency Managers, told Bloomberg.
The Spanish government on Tuesday released its report on the causes of the April 28 blackout that left much of the nation, as well as parts of Portugal, without power for more than 12 hours. Ecological Transition Minister Sara Aagesen, who heads Spain’s energy policy, told reporters that a voltage surge in the south of Spain had triggered a “chain reaction of disconnections” that led to the widespread power loss, and blamed the nation’s state-owned grid operator Red Eléctrica for “poor planning” and failing to have enough thermal power stations online to control the dynamic voltage, the Associated Press reports. Additionally, Aagesen said that utilities had preventively shut off some power plants when the disruptions started, which could have helped the system stay online. “We have a solid narrative of events and a verified explanation that allows us to reflect and to act as we surely will,” Aagesen went on, responding to criticisms that Spain’s renewable-heavy energy mix was to blame for the blackout. “We believe in the energy transition and we know it’s not an ideological question but one of this country’s principal vectors of growth when it comes to re-industrialisation opportunities.”
Metrograph
“It seems that with the current political climate, with the removal of any reference to climate change on U.S. government websites, with the gutting of environmental laws, and the recent devastating fires in Los Angeles, this trilogy of films is still urgently relevant.” —Filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal on the upcoming screenings of the Anthropocene trilogy, co-created with Nicholas de Pencier and photographer Edward Burtynsky between 2006 and 2018, at the Metrograph in New York City.
Shares in Sunrun, SolarEdge, and Enphase are collapsing on the Senate’s new mega-bill draft.
The residential solar rescue never happened. Shares in several residential solar companies plummeted Tuesday as the market reacted to the Senate Finance Committee’s reconciliation language, which maintains the House bill’s restriction on investment tax credits for residential solar installers and its scrapping of the tax credit for homeowners who buy their own systems.
The Solar Energy Industries Association, a solar trade group, criticized the Senate text, saying that it had only “modest improvements on several provisions” and would “pull the plug on homegrown solar energy and decimate the American manufacturing renaissance.”
Sunrun shares fell 40% Tuesday, bringing the company’s market cap down by almost $900 million to $1.3 billion, a comparable loss in value to what it sustained the day after the passage of the House reconciliation bill. The stock price had jumped up late last week due to optimism that the Senate Finance bill might include friendlier language for its business model.
Instead the Finance Committee proposal would terminate the residential clean energy tax credit for any systems, including residential solar, six months after the bill is signed. The text also zeroes out investment and production tax credits for residential solar when “the taxpayer rents or leases such property to a third party,” a common arrangement in the industry pioneered by Sunrun.
Sunrun’s third party ownership model well predates the Inflation Reduction Act and is about as old as the company itself, which was founded in 2007. The company had been claiming investment tax credits for solar before the IRA made them tech neutral. The company began securitizing solar deals in 2015 and in a 2016 securities filling, the company said that it had six deals where investors would be able to garner the lease payments and investment tax credits.
“Ain’t no sunshine for resi,” Jefferies analyst Julien Dumoulin-Smith wrote in a note to clients on Tuesday. “Overall, we view Senate's version as a negative” for Sunrun, as well as SolarEdge and Enphase, the residential solar equipment companies, whose shares are down by about 33% and 24% respectively.
“If this language is not adjusted before the bill passes the Senate floor,” Morgan Stanley analyst Andrew Perocco wrote in a note to clients, “we believe Sunrun, SolarEdge, and Enphase will trade towards our bear cases.”
Morgan Stanley had earlier estimated that cutting off home solar from tax credits would lead to a “85% contraction in residential solar volumes” due, in many cases, to solar products no longer resulting in savings on electricity bills.
That’s because the ability to lease solar equipment (or have homeowners sign power purchase agreements) and then claim tax credits sits at the core of the contemporary residential solar model.
“Our core solar service offerings are provided through our lease and power purchase agreements,” the company said in its 2024 annual report. “While customers have the option to purchase a solar energy system outright from us, most of our customers choose to buy solar as a service from us through our Customer Agreements without the significant upfront investment of purchasing a solar energy system.”
This means that to claim tax credits for the projects, they have to be investment tax credits, not home energy credits. These credits play a role in Sunrun’s extensive business raising money from investors to finance solar projects, which can then be partially monetized via tax credits.
Fund investors “can receive attractive after-tax returns from our investment funds due to their ability to utilize Commercial ITCs,” the company said in its report. The financing then “enables us to offer attractive pricing to our customers for the energy generated by the solar energy system on their homes.”
Without the ability to claim investment tax credits, Sunrun could be left having to charge higher prices to homeowners and face a higher cost of capital to raise money from investors.
“Last night’s draft text confirms the Senate intends to abruptly repeal tax credits available to homeowners who want to go solar – effectively increasing costs and limiting choice for countless Americans,” Chris Hopper, chief executive of Aurora Solar, said in an emailed statement.