Evacuation Notification Colors: How Arizona, Nevada, and New Mexico are Doing it Wrong
Are evacuation colors important?
Immediately starting with a question. When you see these three colors, which one means good, which one means caution, and which one means bad?
If you’re like a large chunk of the American population, it goes like this
Green = Good.
Yellow = Caution.
Red = Bad.
Humans use colors to mean different things all the time.
With stoplights, red means stop, it isn’t safe to cross.
Yellow means slow down, it will soon be unsafe.
Green means go, everything is good and safe.
Animals are colored red as a warning that they are unsafe to eat as below.
And in disasters, it is no different. These three colors are used widely in disasters to mean good, caution, bad.
Triage colors for mass casualty situations are green, yellow, red, and black.
Green is walking wounded or those with minor injuries, meaning those individuals can either evacuate themselves from the situation and maybe transport themselves to the hospital if needed but their injuries are not severe enough to need immediate treatment.
Yellow means wounded who cannot evacuate themselves but are not in immediate need of medical attention and therefore can wait and are in a cautionary state of injury.
Red means they cannot wait, they are in the worst state and need immediate medical assistance or they will not survive. In summation, its bad.
Black, just for your education, means they are dead.
This even extends to how people view the severity of storm warnings. Look at the below screenshot and figure out which polygons you’re taking the most seriously.
Most people in the Midwest and the South are immediately taking the red warning polygon more seriously. Why? It is a tornado warning.
The next most serious is the yellow warning polygon or the severe thunderstorm warning.
And finally, the afterthought, the green polygon warning. The flash flood warning.
Ask just about anyone and that’s the order of serious they are taking them. All of these can cause damage, injuries, and even deaths. But one is taken significantly more seriously than the others.
Which brings me to evacuation colors. There are really two main common disasters that have evacuations en masse, hurricanes and wildfires.
Below is an evac map for the Tampa Bay area in Florida. Red is the evacuation zone that is most likely to be required to evacuate due to an oncoming hurricane. You’ll notice it is in the area most likely to have significant damage. It then drops to yellow, then green, then purple for least likely.
This color scheme makes sense. It immediately tells you where things are bad.
In this screenshot below of a wildfire evacuation in California you can immediately see the areas that need to evacuate because red is bad. Go get out. Be somewhere else. Yellow is your caution level. You need to be prepared because it is on the way to becoming unsafe.
It is this way essentially everywhere in the United States. Except three states that consistently have large and deadly wildfires: Arizona, New Mexico, and Nevada.
This is a screenshot of the evacuation orders for the Dragon Bravo Fire on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. It’s the one that is a huge deal right now because it was allowed to burn naturally and burnt down the Historic Grand Canyon Lodge. What do you notice about this?
That’s right. The evacuation order color for Arizona is green. Yellow means get set because it is becoming unsafe, which makes sense. Red essentially means stay where you are because it is safe but get ready. If that feels incredibly backwards, you are right.
And it isn’t just Arizona. New Mexico and Nevada do the same.
Now as I was doing research for this particular complaint I was just going to yell at the states that did this. But I realized, this color coding wasn’t their idea. This whole confusing idea was based on a grant from FEMA and DHS that an organization called RSG received to develop a wildfire preparation and mitigation program. Which stands for, you guessed it, Ready, Set, Go. They are an organization that falls under the International Association of Fire Chiefs. The Ready, Set, Go program is the one that chose red, yellow, and green for the different levels of evacuation, red for get ready, yellow for set, and green for go. Now they do say on their website that the colors can be chosen by local authorities to fit whatever their local evacuation guidelines are. Which is fine. But even on their own website, the color choices are contradictory. But because they said it can be changed by local authorities to fit what a good evacuation scheme is for their local area, I’m going to lay the blame on the states who chose to continue with this weird color scheme. New Mexico, Nevada, and Arizona.
In fact, in New Mexico’s wildfire preparedness guide which they straight up used the one from RSG, they use red as both good and bad. In the same document. You can see screenshots below.
But in the same document when they discuss defense of your home, they use red for the area closest to your house as most critical and dangerous, orange as intermediate distance or cautionary, and yellow as furthest or least dangerous.
So does this really actually matter? Shouldn’t their be words to go along with it to tell you what to do? The answer is yes. In an emergency situation where you need to be able to make quick decisions possibly based on little information, you need to have quick, reliable, clear information. Sometimes that is simply different colors.
Even as someone who knows full well that these three states do it backwards from everyone else and from common sense, I still have a quick thought of “oh no immediate evacuations” every time I see the color green highlighted. And if you’re a visitor or tourist, as in the case with the currently ongoing Dragon Bravo Fire around the north rim of the Grand Canyon, seeing a giant green area feels like you should be safe.
But you’re not. This is the evacuation zone for these fires.
Should people actually read the information along with it? Yes.
Are they? No.
These three states need to change the colors of their evacuations. They are causing unnecessary confusion and it will absolutely lead to injuries and/or deaths.
Am I aware this is a very niche complaint? Yes. But it is the hill I will die on.
Arizona, Nevada, and New Mexico. Fix your wildfire evacuation color scheme.