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For the most part, the areas evacuated were not inner city, dense urban populations. Plus, San diego has a highly developed sense of volunteerism and service - 100 thousand active duty personnel, 300 thousand retired military. People are offering to pick up and do laundry for the stadium refugees!
We went through this 4 years ago, and everybody learned lessons from it. there are still people who had no clue, but most people effected in Ranch Bernardo (worst hit) were white collar, and the houses than burned average probably $750k. Their coping skills are reasonable. And the denser parts of the city and hotels were open to absorb the evacuees. remember that at peak only about 15,000 peple went to qualcomm. All the others (the balance of the 500,000+ potential evacuees) got absorbed by the community. the number of homes lost will be less than 5000, so the destruction is much less that Katerina, and the infrastucture is still in place.
San diego has had some high profile city management issues, financial mismanagement, and rubber stamping developers plans, that type of thing. But therre is still a sense of amatuerism to the city politics compared to say, Chicago. almost innocence, and it comes out in the community spirit in a big way at times like this.
"High Fire Danger" is a season here and the level of awareness is very high. It's always a question of when and where, not if.
There's also the difference between having emergency supplies in your house, and what you can pack in your car and take with you on less than an hours notice. Ranch Bernardo got evacuated at 4:00 AM on short notice, the fires moved the 20 miles overnight.
kids, pets, important papers, computers, overnight clothes...gee we're out of room, can't take our years' survivalist supplies.
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