Mar. 30—Every day, Brian Williams mulls over disasters that could threaten Santa Fe: floods, fires, hazardous spills.
"I am the guy that gets paid to have the city's bad dreams," said Williams, director of Santa Fe's Office of Emergency Management. "These threats out there are very real."
By far, Williams said, the most significant large-scale threat to Santa Fe is wildfire.
That's why his office spent much of the past year working with the modeling company Simtable, which is based in Santa Fe but has projects across the globe, to create a "state-of-the-art" dynamic model of how city residents should evacuate in a fire that Williams outlined in a public demonstration on Saturday at the Public Safety Building.
Simtable's models not only take into account fire behavior based on factors such as topography and vegetation, but also expected traffic congestion.
Using the simulations, the city mapped out evacuation zones along the eastern and northern edges of Santa Fe that emergency managers can designate as at varying degrees of risk in a fire. For instance, the city could select certain zones to evacuate while telling residents in other zones to be alert for a potential evacuation.
"I didn't want to just sit down with a map and etch out evacuation zones based on some arbitrary, 'This is where I think I should draw the line,' " Williams said. "We wanted it to be science based."
For now, the model focuses on neighborhoods in eastern Santa Fe where homes begin to mingle with wilderness — what's called a wildland-urban interface — because those areas were identified as highest risk for fire in a 2008 county preparedness plan, he said.
The model does not designate evacuation routes for each neighborhood, since fires could come from any direction.
However, it will allow the city to include a link in emergency alerts answering residents' questions of "Where do I go?" based on their location.
Those instructions will consider modeling of intersections where traffic could bottleneck — which can also inform where law enforcement should go to direct cars — and will identify safety zones of defensible space where residents should gather if evacuation is not possible, Williams said.
Though the technology is in place to address an emergency "tomorrow," Williams' office is still conducting public outreach on the new tool, which he hopes to have rolled out on the city webpage by mid-May, he said.
About 10 residents who attended Saturday's demonstration praised Simtable's model and called for greater attention to emergency planning by the city, including more staff for the Office of Emergency Management.