UCLA Civil & Environmental Engineering Department

Future Faculty Lecture

Infrastructure Criticality through Traffic Simulations: lessons learned from the 2018 Paradise Camp Fire

Millard L. McElwee

PhD Candidate

University of California, Berkeley

mcelwee@berkeley.edu

As environmental conditions increase the frequency and severity of wildfires and populations move into areas prone to wildfires, social and economic losses escalate exponentially. These wildfire-prone environments are known as wildland urban interfaces (WUI) where communities live near vegetative and structural ignition sources that can arise out of natural (e.g. lightning strikes) or manmade (e.g. campfires, downed power lines, arson) events. The economic cost of the 2017 California wildfires was estimated at 18 billion, with ensuing social costs of interrupted schooling, housing, transportation, and business operations adding to the trauma and time needed for recovery. The Camp Fire, which began on November 8, 2018, provides an instructive case study of the size, scale, and costs of wildfire risk in California. This seminar presents an open source dynamic traffic model and simulation results in support of short-notice evacuation planning strategies. Lessons are shared from six field trips to the fire-damaged region where decision-makers were interviewed from federal, state, county, city, and town organizations who were actively engaged in response and recovery operations related to the fire. Key findings are summarized from the Quick Response Report, conducted with support from the National Science Foundation and administered through the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado Boulder.

                     Where:   Engineering VI, Cohen Room134A

                     When:    11:00 AM– 12:00 PM, Monday, February 24, 2020

Millard McElwee is a licensed contractor (highways, roads, and bridges) in his home state of Louisiana. He currently resides in Oakland, CA and is pursuing a PhD in Civil Systems at UC Berkeley after recently graduating with a B.S. in Civil Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and a MEng in Civil Engineering Systems from UC Berkeley. He is a National Physical Science Consortium (NPSC) Fellow at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Community Resilience. His research interests include environmental fluid flow, traffic simulations, hazard analysis, and machine learning. During the summers, Millard teaches courses on neural networks in disaster resilience and sensor networks for monitoring water systems through CMU’s STEM summer programs.