Abstract
Despite the controversy regarding their use, school buildings are often assigned as emergency evacuation shelters, temporary accommodation and aid distribution hubs following disasters. This paper presents a methodology to compare the relative suitability of different school buildings for these purposes by using the analytical hierarchy process to weight criteria based on the combined opinions of relevant experts and combine these with descriptive scores from surveyed buildings. The aggregated weights show that approximately equal weighting should be given to the hard characteristics (hazard at location and physical vulnerability) and soft characteristics (accessibility, communications, living environment, access to supplies). As well as immediate safety, conditions for inhabitation are important so that displaced persons are not discouraged from evacuating to shelters and shelter life is not detrimental to health and well-being. The study allows an optimal selection of school buildings used as shelters before and after a disaster and highlights where most improvement could be made with relatively little time and resources for both individual buildings and the whole study area. This method was applied to Cagayan de Oro in the Philippines, an area exposed to floods, windstorms and earthquakes, but can be adapted for other local contexts and building types. Among the 38 school buildings surveyed, we identified key areas for improvement as being insufficient pedestrian access for evacuation at night and for those with mobility constraints, and a lack of alternate spaces for evacuee activities leading to interference with education.
Highlights
Adequate shelter in the post-disaster environment is an essential component of survival, safety and security, needed for protection from the weather, illness and disease, and supports the resumption of a sense of normalcy that can lead into early recovery processes (Felix et al 2013)
Hazard at location and physical vulnerability are considered the most important toplevel criteria for both evacuation shelters and aid distribution hubs, with accessibility considered as important as physical vulnerability in the case of aid distribution hubs
While hazard at location and physical vulnerability account for half the weighting score, the other half of the weighting is almost distributed among the rest of the criteria: accessibility, communications, living environment and access to supplies indicating that the quality of the experience depends on all these factors
Summary
Adequate shelter in the post-disaster environment is an essential component of survival, safety and security, needed for protection from the weather, illness and disease, and supports the resumption of a sense of normalcy that can lead into early recovery processes (Felix et al 2013). To serve this purpose effectively, emergency shelters must be accessible to those in need and provide suitable conditions once people arrive; shelter cannot just be thought of as the physical building, but the living conditions it provides (e.g. Faure Walker and Crawford 2017). The city has been affected by recent floods following tropical storm Sendong (Washi, December 2011), typhoon Pablo (Bopha, December 2012) and tropical storm Vinta (Tembin, December 2017)
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