Abstract
Abstract This study demonstrates the potential use of a shopping street with disaster-proof buildings as a temporary evacuation shelter for local residents at the time of a disaster. We propose a simple estimation method to calculate the number of people for which the retail shops and restaurants in the shopping street can potentially provide food and drink using their inventory. We also estimate the number of evacuees that can be accommodated in the vacant spaces of the buildings. Our proposed method is applied to a shopping street in Kobe, Japan. While 5,200 people in the local community are expected to evacuate at the time of an earthquake, our survey shows that, in the case of power, gas, and water outages, the total amount of available food and drink supplied by the local shops and restaurants would be approximately 1,200 and 1,700 person-days, respectively. In another case, in which alternative facilities provide electricity, gas, and water, the amount of available food increases to about 2,800 person-days. Moreover, the building can provide space for overnight stay for approximately 2,300 people. The results also suggest that, by building stockpiles of food and drink in the unoccupied spaces of the building, the capacity of accommodating the local evacuees will be further enhanced. Future directions for more accurate and widely applicable estimation methods are also discussed.
Highlights
The survival of affected people after disasters—one of the key discussion topics in disaster research—heavily depends on the availability of evacuation shelters and food
If we distribute the available food from the shopping street to each person as a one-day meal, 1,202 and 2,774 people are served in the cases without and with substitute utilities, respectively, on the first day of a disaster, as Table 5 shows
The problems associated with evacuation shelters should be discussed along with those associated with the logistics of the disaster relief goods
Summary
The survival of affected people after disasters—one of the key discussion topics in disaster research—heavily depends on the availability of evacuation shelters and food. To ensure the availability of places for a short stay of evacuees, local governments generally designate community centers and school gyms as shelters. This is the same in many other countries, i.e., places that meet certain requirements are designated as shelters, and evacuation planning is implemented based on the availability of such shelters [1, 2, 3]. Some of the designated shelters have insufficient capacity to accommodate evacuees [4] and poor accessibility [5]; people often evacuate to undesignated parks and parking lots of the commercial facilities [5, 6, 7, 8]. People are expected to provide the relief goods essential for survival (e.g., food, water, and blankets) by themselves
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