“No one should die in a disaster” reads the website tagline for Ladris, a California-based startup offering emergency evacuation modeling using artificial intelligence.

The application is part of a growing field using AI to predict disaster scenarios like wildfire and floods. CEO Leo Zlimen said the tool can help local planners find the best routes to move populations out of the way of fast-moving natural disasters threatening urban areas.

The 26-year-old University of California, Berkeley graduate started Ladris with his college roommate in their hometown of Nevada City, Calif.

“There is a path where everyone gets out in a reasonable amount of time,” he said.

This summer, the company added the Pikes Peak Office of Emergency Management to its client list. Director Andrew Notbohm said the regional office will be incorporating the software into the newest iteration of its wildfire evacuation planning process this year.

Dozens of local fire, police and other agencies have been trained on Ladris. The goal is to help “challenge

assumptions” about the best evacuation strategies in the event of a fast-moving, wind-driven fire, Notbohm said.

The application works by creating a virtual representation of traffic patterns based on presets about population levels and vehicles on the road. When an emergency planner simulates an evacuation, the hope is the software can accurately identify possible bottlenecks and backups.

“It basically creates a digital twin,” Notbohm said.

At the beginning of the month, Palmer Lake Fire Department Chief John Vincent’s staff was using Ladris for the first time to simulate an evacuation during the small town’s Fourth of July celebration, an event that attracts thousands. With three cardinal directions to take traffic out of town and few roads, he said his options are naturally limited.

“It just help us with thought process,” Vincent said of the software.

Using technology to simulate evacuation routes is not a new idea. The Gazette in 2022 used the Fast Local Emergency Evacuation Times Model (FLEET) and its analysis to show that the community of Evergreen had some of the longest wildfire-evacuation times in the state. FLEET is operated by Old Dominion University in Virginia and is accessible to the public.

What makes Ladris different — and worth its more than $100,000 price tag for an 18-month contract — is the user interface, Notbohm said.

While applications like FLEET can analyze data to produce estimates for how long it takes to clear an area to a certain evacuation point, it’s difficult to work with and clunky to customize.

“Some of the other software is not very dynamic or operational,” Notbohm said.

Ladris is more nimble, something that might even be deployable in real time during a disaster. Notbohm said he is interested in seeing how the software can be used to model evacuations that include temporary refuge points like parking lots that could be safe in the path of fire, a strategy already used on the fly during the Los Angeles fires this year.

“Ladris is just intuitive,” Notbohm said. “If I could give it to you right now, you would be running scenarios and understanding what they mean.”

Another selling point is the company behind the product. Notbohm said he liked that Ladris was “supported, updated, and validated.” In other words, someone will pick up the phone for questions, while the data and science behind the software is based on research.

“Why we like Ladris is we can go back to the engineers and say, ‘Tell me why this is acting the way it is, the software,’” he said.

The operational capacity of Ladris is yet to be seen. Vincent said he was using the software for planning, but conditions during a real emergency are so dynamic he says his department will be relying on human-powered experience and training.

“There’s no absolute when the incident presents itself,” he said.

For now, Ladris is only an operational tool for the Pikes Peak Office of Emergency Management and its partnered agencies. The public, and most public officials outside emergency management, won’t have access.

That disappoints Dana Duggan, founder of local political nonprofit Integrity Matters and a former leader of Westside Watch, an organization that advocates for the use of wildfire-evacuation data in urban planning.

“I guess anything’s better than nothing, but it’s pointless unless you’re going to use it,” she said.

On the other side, Notbohm says the thinking in emergency management is that keeping evacuation plans less defined to the public keeps them more flexible.

Some local fire districts and municipalities feel the same. Manitou Springs, for example, does not publish evacuation plans because of the “inherently unpredictable behavior of wildfires.”

Vincent says Palmer Lake officials map scenarios but can’t solidify to the public every action the town might take in a wildfire. He said the evacuation plan was ever-evolving.

“They don’t understand it’s in my head,” he said.

Notbohm said that the Pikes Peak Office of Emergency Management would decide once its review is done on what information it releases to the public.

“We will come up with some messaging to get out with at the end of this process,” he said.