Evaluation method and empirical study on service quality of seismic emergency shelters

Abstract

Effective evaluation on layout and service quality of emergency shelters can make great references for risk reduction and emergency management. However, spatial layout of emergency shelters in urban spaces are quite difficult to be made clear, in particular some open spaces located among multi- storied buildings were usually neglected. This is quite a big problem for evaluation. Our paper firstly proposed an identification model to pick out candidate emergency shelters from concentrated cities based on urban land-use, buildings, and so on. Considering potential risk of topographical features, geographical conditions, and other danger sources, emergency shelters suitable for evacuation were filtered out from those candidate shelters by safety index we built. Secondly, considering the distance and capacity of emergency shelters, accessibility and adequacy model was designed to evaluate service quality of emergency shelters. Finally, all the models were tested in Haidian District, Beijing in China.Several conclusions can be drawn as follows.(1) The layout of emergency shelters and spatial pattern of population distribution cannot match each other in some region, for example, the emergency shelters are quite dispersed in the southeast where the population density is quite high.(2) Many regions were inaccessible in the south of Haidian within 1 minute after earthquake, and these regions reduced highly when it extended to 5 minutes.(3) Compared with the conditions in daytime, the capacity of emergency shelters at night seems worse,especially the Xiaonanzhuang residential area in the middle of Haidian. However, it is quite interesting that some street blocks of higher or lower capacity of emergency shelters have good connectivity with each other. Spatial planning of labeling system of emergency shelters in these blocks in future may play an important role in guiding people towards different shelters, which may improve service equality of emergency shelters.