As wildfires, floods and extreme weather become more frequent and unpredictable, communities are learning to live in a constant state of readiness — with growing consequences for mental health and everyday life.
During a weekend break in California’s Mendocino wine country this summer, temperatures approached 38C. With wildfires raging across Canada and Europe, the heat was unsettling, but California had so far avoided any major blazes.
Then a grey cloud appeared above a forested ridge. A quick check of Watch Duty, the wildfire-tracking app widely used across California, revealed that it was smoke from a fast-moving fire several miles away, near vineyards we had just driven past.
As evacuation orders were issued and a nearby freeway closed, plans changed quickly. Escape routes were mapped out, the car was taken down the hill to charge, and bags were repacked. After a restless night of alerts, sirens and helicopters announced another fire in the dry hills directly to the west.
For Californians, a degree of anxiety about natural disasters has long been part of life. Earthquakes remain an ever-present possibility, but wildfires have become a year-round threat. The constant alerts from Watch Duty are a reminder that being ready to leave at short notice is no longer an occasional precaution.
This is something more specific than general climate anxiety. As extreme weather events become harder to predict and contain, evacuation readiness is turning into a mindset. Instead of simply worrying about the possibility of disaster, people are reorganising their lives around the need to respond to it.
A small fire near a home can escalate rapidly, particularly during periods of extreme heat and strong winds. The danger is no longer confined to remote forests or distant communities. It can reach neighbourhoods within minutes, making the question of whether to evacuate increasingly personal.
Adrienne Heinz, a clinical research psychologist at Stanford University, says repeated climate threats are placing people’s nervous systems under sustained pressure. The time available to adapt is shrinking as successive crises overlap.
Her own family experienced this soon after moving to Healdsburg, in California’s Sonoma wine country, in 2017. They had to evacuate as a major wildfire swept through the region, killing 22 people and destroying more than 5,000 homes.
Heinz says she realised then that life would never quite return to normal. Two years later, her family fled another approaching fire. In 2020, they faced a different dilemma: when a third major blaze prompted evacuation advice, her three-year-old child had Covid.
Even on nights when no fire is visible, the threat shapes daily routines. Heinz monitors wind conditions and official red-flag warnings, which indicate weather favourable to dangerous fires. Some of her patients choose to spend such nights in hotels or with friends. Others take turns sleeping, unwilling to risk having to flee in the middle of the night without time to get dressed.
That approach has become familiar in the Berkeley Hills, where densely vegetated neighbourhoods are particularly vulnerable to wildfires. On high-risk days, some residents pack their cars and leave before an evacuation order arrives.
The routine involves preparing emergency bags for the family and pets, securing important documents and identifying somewhere to go. Even short-term plans can include alternative meeting points in case roads become impassable or the fire spreads towards the coast.
The anxiety can be triggered even when a fire is quickly contained. A recent alert about a fast-moving blaze in the Berkeley Hills brought back memories of the devastating Oakland-Berkeley Hills firestorm of 1991, which killed 25 people and destroyed around 3,000 homes. The latest fire was extinguished before reaching residential areas, but the physical response — the rush of adrenaline and heightened alertness — lingered.
Britt Wray, a Stanford researcher who studies the psychological effects of climate change, says this kind of hypervigilance is becoming increasingly common. When a threat is both credible and close to home, the brain’s threat-response system is activated.
Living through cascading disasters
The pressure is being intensified by increasingly volatile weather patterns. Extreme heat, rising sea levels, destructive storms and prolonged droughts are affecting communities across the world, often with consequences that reach far beyond the location where a disaster begins.
Wildfire smoke can travel across borders. Pacific storms can devastate coastlines thousands of kilometres away. Shrinking rivers and reservoirs threaten water supplies, while melting glaciers can trigger sudden floods in mountain communities.
The result is a growing sense that climate-related disasters are no longer isolated events happening somewhere else. They are interconnected threats that can affect people even when the immediate danger is far away.
The current El Niño cycle is adding to those concerns, contributing to higher temperatures and changing rainfall and storm patterns. In California, unusually hot conditions and the risk of Pacific storms have raised concerns about both wildfires and coastal flooding.
One phenomenon attracting attention is the Kelvin wave: a slow-moving underwater wave associated with El Niño that can raise sea levels along coastlines. When combined with storms, even a relatively modest rise in sea level can increase the risk of flooding and force residents to leave their homes.
Elsewhere, fires in Indonesia have sent smoke across Southeast Asia, while extreme rainfall and flooding have affected communities in Asia, Africa and South America.
But the ability to prepare for evacuation is not shared equally. Leaving early requires access to transport, money and somewhere safe to stay. For people without those resources, the choice to evacuate may be far more difficult, even when the danger is immediate.
Governments are increasingly encouraging residents to think ahead. Australia’s New South Wales Rural Fire Service, for example, advises households to prepare physically and emotionally for emergencies and to leave early, well before a fire reaches their area.
Elissa Epel, a professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, describes the current period as one of cascading trauma. The expectation of disaster, she says, has become part of everyday life, even though no one knows when the next crisis will arrive.
Epel’s own awareness of climate-related stress intensified in September 2020, when wildfires turned the skies over the San Francisco Bay Area an eerie orange. The experience highlighted how quickly environmental threats can transform an ordinary day.
When vigilance becomes a coping strategy
Constant alertness comes at a psychological cost. Monitoring weather warnings, tracking fires and preparing to leave can make it difficult to relax, even when no immediate danger exists.
But mental health specialists also point to a potential benefit. Unlike a general sense of helplessness about climate change, practical preparedness can give people a degree of control. Making homes more resilient, keeping emergency supplies ready and agreeing on evacuation plans can turn anxiety into action.
The challenge is to remain prepared without allowing the threat to dominate every aspect of life.
As the Mendocino weekend came to an end, the fires were still burning and the freeway remained closed. The journey home required taking a quieter road through vineyards and orchards.
For an hour, at least, the wildfire alerts stopped. Watch Duty fell silent, offering a brief respite from the feeling that the next emergency could be just around the corner.
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