Among the deadly tragedies cited in the report are the 2018 Camp Fire east of Chico, and the 2020 North Complex Fire in Butte, Plumas and Yuba counties.
A drone view of a neighborhood between Chelsea Drive and Oak Bridge Lane near Alhambra Valley Road in Martinez, Calif. , on Thursday, June 4, 2026.
According to a new UC Santa Barbara study, the area is high-risk for people dying during a wildfire since there are very few escape routes to a main road. In scenic Alhambra Valley south of Martinez, where forest and grasslands surround large homes, wildfire risk is high, and for retired technology executive Kevin Lewis and his wife, there’s only one road out.
“It’s concerning,” said Lewis, 71. “When you live on this specific road that I live on, there’s a small bridge that’s your exit point — that’s it. ”He and his wife have gamed out their evacuation response, factoring in the egress problem and planning to stage a vehicle beyond the bridge should fire threaten the valley.
“They are integrally connected, fire and escape route,” said Lewis, 71. “You have to look at them in the same breath.
” Alhambra Valley is one of many communities in the Bay Area that a new study suggests face a sharply higher risk of that residents will die duringResearchers from UC Santa Barbara analyzed wildfire deaths across the U.S. from 2008 to 2024 in relation to road networks and concluded that communities with few ways out saw the vast majority of fatalities.
“If you know you’re in an egress-limited community, you should have conversations with your family, your neighbors, your community about what your plan is,” said study co-author Caitlin Fong. “Your road networks are probably very important for your survivability. ” Michael Wara, senior research scholar at Stanford University’s Woods Institute for the Environment, said communities at risk of fire that have few routes out are “a huge concern for the Bay Area.
” Wara, who was not involved in the study, noted that many of the 25 victims of the 1991 Oakland hills Tunnel Fire were killed in cars.
“They were stuck in gridlock. ”, published June 1 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found wildfire deaths were concentrated in communities that had one to six roads leading to safety, making evacuees “vulnerable to congestion, blockage, or simultaneous exposure to fire fronts. ” Small residential roads were not included.
“We clearly see this trend where a lot of the deaths in these very fast wildland-urban interface fires are due to the evacuation process and if there aren’t enough egress routes that’s obviously going to increase the risk,” said UC Berkeley fire scientist Michael Gollner, who was not involved in the research.in Butte, Plumas and Yuba counties that killed 13 people in Berry Creek, “a small community with only two exits. ” In both locations, many people died in vehicles.showing communities of 50,000 residents or fewer, including Clayton in Contra Costa County and Los Gatos, that face elevated wildfire evacuation risk.
Risk level was determined by combining the chances of the area burning in a wildfire with the number of ways to get out. Spots on the map are color coded. Communities deemed most at risk are represented by magenta spots on the map. Those areas had both the greatest likelihood of burning — as determined by the U.S. Forest Service — and six or fewer exit routes.
But otherwise, the researchers did not rank the danger, because it could vary considerably within categories depending on factors including fire behavior, evacuee behavior and weather, Fong said. Fong said she would worry more about a community with a “medium” chance of burning and few exits than a place with many exits and a high chance of burning.
“Odds are that community would not be particularly prepared,” Fong said. “I think that’s a very dangerous place to be. ” However, Fong added, Altadena, a Southern California community hit by the Eaton Fire last year after the study period, had 20 exits and a high hazard, and 19 people were killed.
Gollner cautioned that because the map captures the number of routes, not necessarily how usable they would be during a fire, it does not include some areas with significant evacuation issues despite having many escape routes, such as the Berkeley and Oakland hills, parts of Marin County and areas of the Santa Cruz Mountains hit by the 2020 CZU fires.
“They have a lot of snaking egress points, but they’re slow, they get blocked, there’s vegetation and structures on all sides,” Gollner said. In Santa Clara County, “it is a luxury in the high fire-risk zones to be able to have six routes out,” said Seth Schalet, CEO of the Santa Clara County FireSafe Council, a non-profit fire-protection group of individuals, agencies and businesses.
Some areas around Los Gatos, Monte Sereno, Saratoga and Cupertino that aren’t on the map have steep, winding roads that would hamper evacuation, Schalet said. Highway 17, a key escape route, would “likely be a parking lot or very slow,” Schalet added. Woodsy, hilly areas like many neighborhoods in Orinda, Moraga, Los Altos Hills, Woodside and Portola Valley also have narrow roads, Wara noted.
While the report focuses on getting out, the ability of emergency vehicles to get into fire zones can also be crucial for residents and homes, Schalet said.
“Often there’s not enough space for a fire engine to get up a winding road and a vehicle to come out, or for a fire engine to turn around,” Schalet said. “That layer of congestion could really slow things down. ” With climate change and decades of fire suppression contributing to increasingly frequent and severe wildfires in California, “We’re seeing parts of our landscape burning that previously haven’t burned,” Fong said.
“We have these small towns that sort of speckle the landscape in these fire-prone areas. You have to do work in hundreds of these communities to mitigate this risk. ” Building more roads can be a “gut response” to the problem, but that’s expensive and not necessarily helpful if they run parallel to existing roads, Fong said, adding that many fires start near roads.
Wara said local ordinances prohibiting street parking in communities with narrow roads when fire risk is high could also help facilitate evacuations. The study could help emergency officials determine which areas should be subject to early evacuation, Wara said. Fire officials typically issue evacuation warnings when there’s a potential threat, and mandatory evacuation orders if the danger becomes immediate.
In areas where road issues could affect evacuation, “Maybe people should evacuate when they get the warning,” said Chelsea Burkett, spokeswoman for Cal Fire’s Santa Clara County unit. Fong and her colleagues found that most of the wildfire victims across the U.S. from 2008 to 2024 were older. The many communities with aging residents and older homes and road infrastructure in the Bay Area and around the state have heightened risk of both wildfire and problematic evacuations, Wara said.
Homes “were built before we even knew how to build for wildfires,” and seniors often need extra time to get out, Wara said. Meanwhile, the National Interagency Coordination Center has classified the risk of wildfires in the Bay Area and along much of the California coast as above normal for this month. In the Alhambra Valley, this is the time of year residents Lewis and his neighbors start thinking about fire, he said.
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