Abstract
In disaster management, evacuation modeling is considered a useful visual tool to disaster managers for reviewing current evacuation strategies, estimating the ability of shelters to accommodate all evacuees, and developing evacuation route planning. Though there are several existing studies on evacuation modeling in the case of an earthquake, research that integrates road blockades into evacuation simulations is quite limited. From that viewpoint, this research aims to develop evacuation modeling with consideration of road blockades to simulate how residents move to evacuation centers (hereafter, shelters) through urban areas following an earthquake occurrence. The research also determines difficulties that residents may encounter under earthquake conditions, compared with normal conditions, corresponding to considering or not considering road blockades, respectively, such as having no access to shelters, taking longer routes instead of shortest routes, and so on. Debris from damaged buildings in an urban area is assumed as the main source of debris that would cause a road blockade. The model is applied to a case study of the Daitoku school district in Kanazawa city. According to simulated results, due to road blockades, occupants of many damaged buildings did not have access to shelters, and a lot of evacuees needed to move to shelters with longer routes instead of taking the shortest routes. Furthermore, the research results show the possibility of considering road blockades for improving current evacuation modeling and making evacuation simulations more realistic.
Highlights
There were 166, 81, and 20 locations of road blockades in the three cases (Figures 7–9 respectively), while the numbers of damaged buildings having no access to main shelters due to road blockades were 81, 20, and 9
The damaged buildings were considered as ones having no access to main shelters if they are located between two locations of road blockage in the same road segment or located in a blind alley with a location of a road blockage
This research integrated road blockades caused by debris from damaged buildings into evacuation modeling for simulating residents’ evacuation to main shelters and estimating the accessibility as well as shelter capacity, both of which have not been included in previous literature
Summary
Though there are several existing studies on evacuation modeling in the case of an earthquake, research that integrates road blockades into evacuation simulations is quite limited. This research aims to develop evacuation modeling with consideration of road blockades to simulate how residents move to evacuation centers (hereafter, shelters) through urban areas following an earthquake occurrence. The research determines difficulties that residents may encounter under earthquake conditions, compared with normal conditions, corresponding to considering or not considering road blockades, respectively, such as having no access to shelters, taking longer routes instead of shortest routes, and so on. Due to road blockades, occupants of many damaged buildings did not have access to shelters, and a lot of evacuees needed to move to shelters with longer routes instead of taking the shortest routes.
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