A late-night fire #OregonFires2020 data thread into the smoky void: @OregonOEM reports that 500,000 Oregonians have evacuated, @AP picks it up and it goes everywhere. Of course! That's more than 10 percent of the state! That's Big News! BBC! WaPo! The Grauniad! But is it right?

I'm having trouble seeing how we have a half-million evacuees. A (very) rough population analysis of the evacuation zones shows that about 95,000 people live in Zone 3 (Go now!) areas. And maybe another 160,000 in Zone 2 (Be Prepared!) So that's 255,000.

But clearly, not everyone in Zone 2 is evacuating (in fact, officials discourage it so the roads aren't clogged for Zone 3 folks). So where are these other 400,000 evacuees coming from? And where are they going?

If you add in the 290,000 people in Zone 1 you get to 545K (which includes all 415K of Clackamas). So you could say more than 500K people are in evacuation areas. But that's not what OEM said, and that's certainly not how it's being played. https://www.oregon.gov/newsroom/Pages/NewsDetail.aspx?newsid=37286

Anyway! I don't know the answer yet. Maybe I'm missing something obvious here. Maybe I'll be embarrassed in the morning! Stay tuned!

#Nerd note: For the (very) rough population analysis I calculated what percentage of each Census Block Group was covered by an evac zone and assumed even population distribution across the block group. Which is obviously not the case, but as I said, (very) rough.

And now stripped across the top of The By God New York Times!