Emergency Management – 2025

Client: La Plata County Office of Emergency Management (LPCOEM), Durango, CO.
Domain: Simulation
Emergency Response
Role: Design Consultant, Creative Strategy, Production Design

2025 Wildfire Evacuation Exercise

Overview

For a second year, I partnered with LPCOEM on its week-long wildfire simulation and training event. Where 2024 centered on coordination across 32 agencies, 2025 shifted to community awareness and preparedness, driven by the early-2025 Palisades-area fires.

“Durango is known for its scenic mountains, forests, and open spaces. Although this part of the nation holds such beauty, destinations such as this are also prone to wildfires. While we will never completely eliminate the risk or occurrence of wildfires, we can be proactive to lessen the risk and severity.” – Durango Fire, Wildfire Division

The Exercise

Phase One: Public Outreach
A two-week, county-wide campaign launched in April: local media, podcast interviews with the USFS and BLM, social media, print collateral, and in-person town halls.

Phase Two: Emergency Communication & Resources

Live test of FEMA's iPAWS and CodeRED alerts to residents' phones
Staffed call center and launch of ReadyLaPlata.org, a resource hub with real-time evacuation information
Preparedness Workshop and Expo at the La Plata County Fairgrounds with fire officials, WWPF, OEM staff, and regional agencies, featuring workshops on:
- Healthcare Facilities Emergency Preparedness
- Access and Functional Needs (AFN) Planning
- Large and Small Animal Evacuation Readiness

Phase Three: Simulated Fire Scenarios
Two neighborhood simulations: the Meadows Fire in Edgemont Meadows and the Rockwood Fire in North Animas Valley (Glacier Club, Cascade Creek, Purgatory). Each featured escalating fire paths, iPAWS evacuation alerts reaching 70,000+ phones, live Search & Rescue with Rapid Tags, Department of Homeland Security check-ins, and post-incident damage assessment in Crisis Track.

What I Designed

Hyper-realistic before-and-after damage simulations
Images of specific residential properties, selected to support LPCOEM's fire progression scenarios. Crisis Track assessors used the before/after images to practice post-fire damage evaluations under realistic conditions.

Process

Used OpenAI's ChatGPT image gen for rapid, iterative development of photorealistic damage tailored to each residential structure
Applied art direction and compositing to depict structural loss, burn-throughs, ash, smoke damage and debris under consistent environmental lighting
Integrated final image sets into the Meadows Fire and Rockwood Fire scenarios

Impact

The striking final imagery grounded the exercise in emotional realism and strengthened the FEMA-style documentation training, damage assessment, and community response workflows
Following strong response in both 2024 and 2025, the client requested the full before-and-after collections as presentation decks for inter-agency briefings and public outreach

ChatGPT Image Gen – Technique. I discovered a handy technique: forcing ChatGPT to focus on a specific area by flooding that region with solid color, then prompting what I needed to see, yielded a superior result.

Juvare's Crisis Track Damage Assessment Software Platform

Example of an assessor capturing simulated damaged residence imagery on site, as if it was real-world damage.

All the before-and-after simulated images were created for this key purpose, offering assessors ‘as real as it gets’ imagery, reflective of what they’ll be witnessing in real life.

Preparedness Workshop and Expo Event at the La Plata County Fairgrounds

← FEATURED