Timely New Study Identifies Top 10 U.S. States With the Most Communities at Risk During an Emergency Evacuation

SAN FRANCISCO, July 13, 2021 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- StreetLight Data, the leader in Big Data analytics for mobility, today unveiled a comprehensive analysis of U.S. states and communities most at risk during an evacuation. Building on earlier research, which focused on the top 100 at-risk communities, the new report includes an analysis of more than 670 communities across the continental U.S. Made available to departments of forestry and fire protection, the data is intended to help prioritize the towns in each state have the most heightened need for bolstered evacuation preparedness.    

California and Florida, on the heels of a 2020 plagued by massive fires and the most active hurricane season on record, are the two states with the largest number of "remote" communities identified by this analysis. StreetLight's methodology uses a mathematical algorithm that identifies town boundaries with too many people relative to the number of roads leading out of town.

"As we head into peak season for wildfires and hurricanes, there is no better time to review emergency evacuation risk with the scale and granularity enabled by Big Data analytics," said Paul Friedman, StreetLight CTO and author of the study. "Sharing information about transportation infrastructure and emergency route options is an important part of disaster preparedness. Our goal in sharing this data is to support those working in this complex field, especially as they look for ways to make our communities safer."

To help identify the communities most affected by constrained evacuation routes, StreetLight analyzed the 30,000 towns in the continental U.S. with populations under 40,000, drawing on the company's vast repository of hyper-local transportation metrics. Communities were then scored using a ratio of the number of roadway "exits" available in each town and the average "load" on the most-used exit, weighted by town population. From those findings, StreetLight was able to identify a subset of 675 U.S. communities that scored at least three times the average of all towns analyzed.

The Top 10 U.S. states with the most communities at risk include:

1. California (91 communities)
2. Florida (62 communities)
3. Arizona (42 communities)
4. Texas (41 communities)
5. Pennsylvania (40 communities)
6. New York (31 communities)
7. Washington (30 communities)
8. West Virginia (28 communities)
9. Virginia (24 communities)
10. New Jersey (23 communities)

The Top 10 U.S. states with the fewest communities at risk include:

1, 2, 3. Montana, Rhode Island, Tennessee (all with zero communities at risk)
4, 5. Connecticut, Delaware (each with one community at risk)
6, 7, 8. Arkansas, Indiana, Oklahoma (each with two communities at risk)
9, 10, 11. Maine, Nebraska, South Carolina (each with three communities at risk)

Additional takeaways of the analysis revealed that:

There are 12 states with at least 20 communities at risk, for a total of 675 U.S. communities across 45 states.
The five most-constrained communities are islands.
One of the three states with the most-at-risk communities is landlocked.
While many think of coastal areas as constrained, many of the communities on the list include canyons or localities by lakes with minimal exits.

View the interactive national map of all 675 communities at https://www.streetlightdata.com/evacuation-data.

Watch a 90-second video from a California community affected by 2020's LNU Lightning Complex Fire that brings to life the StreetLight study and its methodology at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cl5xbwvxB3A.

About StreetLight Data
StreetLight pioneered the use of Big Data analytics to help transportation professionals solve their biggest problems. Applying proprietary machine-learning algorithms to over four trillion spatial data points over time, StreetLight measures diverse travel patterns and makes them available on-demand via the world's first SaaS platform for mobility, StreetLight InSight®. From identifying sources of congestion to optimizing new infrastructure to planning for autonomous vehicles, StreetLight powers more than 6,000 global projects every month. For more information, please visit: http://www.streetlightdata.com.

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SOURCE StreetLight Data