After last week’s horrific fire in Boulder County, we now have a real-time example of the superpower of civility. Let’s hope our politicians take note.

Boulder County Commissioner Matt Jones believes the common decency of folks evacuating their homes last week saved lives.

“There are a couple of things I realized when I was driving away from our home,” he told Associated Press reporters after the fire forced him from his Louisville house.

“One was the patience and grace of all the people getting evacuated. People were kind, polite, letting people in because they were all getting out. And that’s part of the reason I think so many people did well getting out.”

It took less than two hours for erratic 100-mph winds to spread flames several miles from the Marshall area into Louisville. But 35,000 people successfully, compassionately evacuated in a very tight window of space, Incident Commander Mike Smith said.

“At certain points we could not even actively fight the fire,” Smith said. “We just had to concentrate on getting everyone out safely.”

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In many cases, residents hadn’t gotten warning to evacuate. They saw smoke and flames, or received texts and shouts from neighbors, and hightailed it out on their own. In many areas, there were no law enforcement officials available to help direct traffic.

“If it’s a structure fire that is only your house, you feel a little like, ‘Why me?’ But when it’s an entire neighborhood, it lifts you out of yourself,” resident Gwen Brodsky told the Colorado Sun. “It’s about us. It’s a collective.”

Brodsky hit gridlock on Dillon Road as she was evacuating. But even in that life and death moment, Brodsky was struck by the old-fashioned Midwestern civility of her community, describing how people were merging and creating extra lanes while communicating with their eyes. “It was not ‘save myself,’” she told a Sun reporter. “It was ‘save ourselves.’”

By contrast, the roads out of Paradise, Calif., gridlocked within an hour of the first evacuation order of that horrendous fire, and began moving again hours later only after an enormous effort by firefighters, police, bureaucrats and politicians who rushed to jammed intersections to help untangle traffic, according to the Los Angeles Times. Paradise had far fewer exit routes, and 85 people perished in the snarl.

A Los Angeles Times investigation found that Paradise ignored repeated warnings of the risk its residents faced, crafted no plan to evacuate the area all at once, entrusted public alerts to a system vulnerable to fire, and did not sound citywide orders to flee even as a hail of fire rained down.

California has yet to take action on promises to create statewide evacuation standards.

Though we were much luckier here, Colorado should take heed. We need statewide evacuation standards immediately; at the moment, Colorado has a patchwork of fire mitigation and evacuation plans that are severely out of date. The goodwill and grace of residents like those in Boulder County cannot be government policy.

A recent analysis by The Denver Gazette shows some of the most vulnerable areas of the state rely on some of the state’s oldest wildfire protection plans. The fire mitigation and evacuation plans in Boulder County were 11 years out of date, drawn up before the recent population explosions in Louisville and Superior.

At least 70% of new homes built in the last 10 years in the most at-risk areas for wildfire are in neighborhoods without a fire mitigation plan updated in the last five years, the Denver Gazette has reported.

Colorado needs to follow the lead of other states and require mitigation and evacuation plans to be updated regularly, preferably every year, and set some statewide standards for what those plans require.

Colorado also needs to standardize the way we alert people during such deadly blazes, especially as these fires become faster, bigger and more frequent.

Ella Cobb of the Boulder Daily Camera reported that 70 or so residents of Louisville didn’t receive emergency evacuation alert prior to the fire. Instead they were alerted by a neighbor sending out group texts after her husband saw flames bearing down on them.

Boulder County does have 30 outdoor warning sirens, intended for “flood, tornado or other disaster,” according to the Boulder Office of Emergency Management website. “Other disaster” apparently doesn’t include wildfires; no one set these warning sirens off, according to Cobb’s reporting.

An emergency notification system did alert residents to the fire via cellphone, landline, text message and email, but if you hadn’t signed up for the system ahead of time, you didn’t get the message.

The best system is probably wireless emergency alerts, WEAs, which are sent automatically to cellphones within a certain location area. For some reason, though, no WEAs were sent out to cellphones during the Marshall fire, FEMA confirmed to Cobb.

Clearly, our communities need a standardized form of communication that we all know how to use and can rely on in any emergency.

Otherwise, the patchwork of policies we have now leave us as vulnerable as Blanche DuBois at the end of “A Streetcar Named Desire.” She could have been speaking for all our state emergency planning officials when she famously said, “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.”