Direct Relief has been working to pilot a new facility-based wildfire response pack, containing everything from air purifiers to antibiotic ointment, to be placed in strategic locations near wildfire-vulnerable communities. The results can be viewed an interactive map. Direct Relief determined social vulnerability by using five key factors from the CDC’s Social Vulnerability index - poverty, age, disability, vehicle ownership and housing situation.
Building on a recent collaboration among four news services, Direct Relief has mapped which California communities would likely be hardest hit by a wildfire, based on social vulnerability. It's known as "social vulnerability," and Direct Relief has increasingly been taking it into account when planning disaster preparation and response. And events like wildfires are harder on those dealing with poverty, who may have a harder time evacuating and whose financial straits can be worsened by a disaster. Evidence suggests that people with disabilities are at increased risk during a disaster. According to FEMA, adults over 65 had 2.5 times the relative risk of dying in a fire than the general population in 2016. If fire hazard determines how likely it is that a community will burn, factors like these affect how it will respond. Will they be able to get out if the town burns again, and what are the challenges in getting them to safety? How will they navigate the slow, difficult, often uncertain process of rebuilding? Will they ever come back at all? How devastated a community will be by disaster - and how much it will be able to rebuild - is based in part on social factors like residents' income, age, housing situation, and existing illnesses and disabilities. People need to evacuate those buildings, and to rebuild (or not) when the fire is over. Whether a community's buildings will succumb is just one part of a wildfire's saga. Seven months later, many of the community's poorest residents are living in trailers or temporary housing, with little prospect of moving back to Paradise. Which California Communities are Most Vulnerable to Wildfires? By Talya Meyers When the Camp Fire raced into Paradise last November, the majority of the people killed were elderly, disabled, or poor - or some combination thereof. If Direct Relief requests a change to or removal of republished Direct Relief content from a site or on-air, the republisher must comply.įor any additional questions about republishing Direct Relief content, please email the team here.Direct Relief's work is prohibited from populating web pages designed to improve rankings on search engines or solely to gain revenue from network-based advertisements.Īdvance permission is required to translate Direct Relief's stories into a language different from the original language of publication.
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