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A new study has found that Sonoma Valley's roads are not equipped to handle a mass evacuation in the event of wildfire. 

Retired engineer Bean Anderson, who helped organize the study and who lost his Glen Ellen home in the 2017 wildfires, says the findings are alarming.

“The roads in Sonoma Valley are grossly insufficient for people to evacuate in the case of a wildfire, which I think we've seen in the past," said Anderson.

The Sonoma Area Fire Evacuation Study was conducted by the firm KLD Associates in San Antonio, Texas.

The firm says it has conducted evacuation studies and planning for every nuclear power plant in the US and Canada, terrorist attack planning for Washington DC, and wildfire evacuation studies and plans for a dozen cities in the western US.

Kevin Padian is a Sonoma Valley resident and distinguished professor emeritus at UC Berkeley. He says he’s not surprised by the study findings.

“The existing roads are not capable of handling evacuation traffic as it is," said Padian. "And that's because, although it’s not terribly densely populated in the northern Valley, the road system is a century old and they haven't upgraded it to keep pace with the level of population growth, certainly not some of the population growth that's planning to be expanded.”

Anderson says the study also determined the amount of time people could spend on evacuation routes.

"The road capacity rapidly fills up and becomes gridlocked and you're running at bumper-to-bumper 0 to 2 miles an hour," said Anderson.

The $90-thousand-dollar study, which was funded entirely by donations, found that traffic could be gridlocked for hours, making it impossible for residents to escape a fast-moving wildfire.

Anderson says wildfires typically move at about 10-percent of the area windspeed, but that changes when embers catch fire on treetops.

"If the fire gets into the treetops, into the canopies, then it moves at windspeed, which is what happens in most of our big wildfires. So the fires move very fast and every second matters on the road," Anderson said.

The study raises questions and concerns about developments like the proposed housing and hotel project at the former Sonoma Developmental Center near Glen Ellen.

Padian is calling on county officials to use the findings to improve evacuation planning and consider the impact of development on evacuation safety.

“We'd like them to be able to use it in evacuation planning," said Padian. "We'd like them to use it in overall planning for the region in terms of development of property and road systems and so forth. And we'd like them to use it in the context of specific projects to ask whether this would have an impact on evacuations that would be disproportionate to the ability of the roads to handle them.”

The study is available now on the Valley of the Moon Alliance website at votma.org, It will be presented to the public on Monday, February 24th at Altamira Middle School at 6:30pm.