2017 December California Wildfires Evacuation Survey Data

Following the December Southern California Wildfires in 2017, an online survey was distributed by researchers from the University of California, Berkeley to collect information on the individual choices of those impacted by the fires in California. Collected from March to July 2018, the data includes questions regarding risk perceptions, communications, evacuation decisions, potential usage of the sharing economy in disasters, opinions of evacuation management, and demographic information. The survey was distributed with the assistance of local partners (i.e., transportation agencies, emergency management agencies, local city and county governments, CBOs, and news outlets). Partners were allowed to post the survey using electronic communication methods including but not limited to: Facebook, Twitter, Nextdoor, agency websites, news websites, email listservs, and alert subscription services. The survey received 552 valid responses, of which 303 were completed. Subsequent papers using this data retained 226 cleaned survey responses for discrete choice modeling, based on the respondents' completion of key choice and demographic questions. The survey was incentivized with the chance to win one of five $200 gift cards. The survey questions are included in a separate PDF document.

We request that those who download the data send a courtesy email to the lead author, Dr. Stephen Wong ([e-mail]). To ensure that any new research makes unique contributions to knowledge and does not duplicate past analyses, users are requested to read and cite publications using this data including:

Wong, S., Broader, J., Walker, J. & Shaheen, S. (2021). Understanding California Wildfire Evacuee Behavior and Joint Choice-Making. Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4fm7d34j

Wong, S., Walker, J., & Shaheen, S. (2020). Role of Trust and Compassion in Resource Sharing in Evacuations: A Case Study of the 2017 and 2018 California Wildfire. International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2212420920314023

Wong, S., Chorus, C., Shaheen, S. & Walker, J. (2020). A Revealed Preference Methodology to Evaluate Regret Minimization with Challenging Choice Sets: A Wildfire Evacuation Case Study. Travel Behaviour and Society. Retrieved from https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214367X19303291

Wong, S., Broader, J., Shaheen, S. (2020). Review of California Wildfire Evacuations from 2017 to 2019. Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5w85z07g

Wong, S. & Shaheen, S. (2019). Current State of the Sharing Economy and Evacuations: Lessons from California. SB 1 Report. Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/16s8d37x

Additional framing work on evacuations can be found here:

Wong, S. (2020). Compliance, Congestion, and Social Equity: Tackling Critical Evacuation Challenges through the Sharing Economy, Joint Choice Modeling, and Regret Minimization. University of California, Berkeley. Dissertation. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9b51w7h6