When wildfire forces a community to evacuate, decisions made during project review can shape how quickly and safely people can get out. Recent California court decisions have increased scrutiny of how lead agencies address evacuation, and the California State Attorney General’s October 2022 guidance emphasizes evaluating evacuation early, when project design, density, and siting can still change. If you’re scoping a CEQA review today, the expectations are higher than they were a few years ago, and the path to meeting them is not always obvious.

We built the Evacuation Impact Assessment Checklist to help.

The checklist is a qualitative evacuation impact assessment tool that organizes evacuation analysis into three categories: project characteristics that may affect wildfire risk or evacuation capacity, including social vulnerability factors that can affect how people receive and act on warnings; the project and jurisdiction’s emergency access, egress, and evacuation preparedness; and the project’s potential impact on evacuation for the existing community. Questions are drawn from the CEQA statute, the Attorney General’s guidance, and recent court decisions. Wildfire is the primary focus, but the checklist can also be applied to other hazards that affect evacuation routes.

Used early, the checklist provides a clearer structure for documenting evidence, identifying where more information is needed, and determining whether additional analysis may be warranted.