The overarching goal of this multidisciplinary project is to reduce the vulnerability of disadvantaged communities to the impacts of wildfire-related cascading hazards. Wildfire activity is worsening in several regions, including the Western United States. Wildfires are commonly superimposed or followed by a chain of cascading geohazards (e.g., debris flow, landslides), which further impact nearby communities and the built environment.  The impact is more pronounced in disadvantaged communities.  Preparedness is commonly the largest aspect of community resilience to wildfires and the associated cascading hazards but is typically isolated to single events. Cascading hazards place disadvantaged communities at risk for disastrous outcomes, which are projected to worsen with climate variability and change.

This project supports a multidisciplinary planning effort toward mitigating the impacts of cascading hazards from social science, climate, engineering, and decision-making perspectives. This project provides a capacity-building opportunity to better assess and quantify how the sequence of drought, wildfires, landslides, and flooding may drive one another and how the consequences of these cascading hazards may scale in both time and space. This project will provide insights into: (1) the science of cascading hazards and their tempo-spatial characteristics and impacts in a changing climate, (2) social and physical vulnerability in disadvantaged communities against the risk of cascading hazards, as opposed to a single hazard, and (3) an efficient strategy to communicate the risks of cascading hazards, which are inherently different in their devastation and scale.

The project involves collaboration with California Office of Emergency Services (CalOES) and will focus on Lake County, CA, which has vulnerable communities and growing multi-hazard threats. While applied to a sequence of drought, wildfires, landslides, and flooding, this framework is directly translatable to any set of cascading hazards and will advance the state-of-knowledge to go beyond hazard evaluation that typically focuses on a single event.