Abstract
In order to reduce human casualties, rescue activities by local residents play an important role in the chaotic times immediately after an earthquake occurs because it is difficult to expect the sufficient and quick support by public rescue teams such as firefighters, police officers and the Self-Defense Forces. Therefore, it is necessary to quantitatively understand both the effects and risk of these activities based on the numerical analyses, and concretely discuss how to perform rescue activities by local residents as part of disaster mitigation planning. In this paper, we incorporate the following aspects into the wide-area evacuation simulation model which we have previously developed: (1) people trapped in a building and on a street; (2) rescue activities by local residents; (3) the behavior of people who get over the rubble of collapsed buildings; (4) the difference of the attribute of evacuees. Using this simulation model, first, we demonstrate the effectiveness of rescue activities by local residents in densely built-up wooden residential areas in the aftermath of a large earthquake. Even considering the influence of property damages (such as building-collapse, fire-spreading and street-blockage) and the necessity of wide-area evacuation after an earthquake occurs, it might be possible to reduce the number of casualties by 13.7% in average in case that local residents themselves perform rescue operations. Also, the number of people who die after the participation in rescue activities is less than half of the people saved from the collapsed buildings in average. Next, we attempt to describe the relationships among elapsed time from an earthquake occurrence, property damages, human casualties and people engaged in rescue activities. Although fires still continue to spread after 12 hours pass since an earthquake occurs, the peak of the number of people who are saved from collapsed buildings or engage in rescue activities is about an hour passes since an earthquake occurrence time. Also, it becomes extremely difficult for local residents themselves to find people trapped in a building after five or six hours pass since an earthquake occurs. The effective hours to perform rescue activities are different according to the earthquake occurrence time, the damage state of each building, the rescue ability of local residents, the spatial characteristics, etc. However, the methods proposed in this paper enable us to quantitatively understand the process of rescue activities by local residents in a certain scenario of a large earthquake. Furthermore, we analyze characteristics of places where many people might be dead or trapped on a street. Focusing on the spatial distribution of casualties and people trapped on a street, we can find the following tendencies: (1) the possibilities that casualties occur are higher and the number of those people is more in more densely built-up wooden residential areas; (2) the possibilities that casualties occur are much lower, but the damage scale is more devastating in the areas where the temporal refuges and large-scale housing complexes are located; (3) the possibilities that casualties occur are lower in areas facing on multiple sufficiently wide streets than other areas; (4) rescue activities by local residents result in a bit higher possibilities that casualties occur due to the delay of evacuation, but can contribute to less number of casualties in each area.
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More From: Journal of Architecture and Planning (Transactions of AIJ)
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