Rural community response to accidental toxic gas release: An individual emergency response model during self-organized evacuations

Abstract

The emergency response ability in rural areas is weaker than in urban areas. Once a major accident occurs in a rural area, it is more likely to cause serious consequences. Thus, we propose a individual emergency response model during self-organized evacuations after accidental toxic gas releases in rural areas. The proposed model can reproduce emergency information dissemination and individual emergency decision-making in self-organized evacuations. We propose an improved susceptible infected recovered model for emergency information dissemination process. At the same time, we propose a emergency decision-making mechanism to simulate individual emergency actions. In this model, individual personality characteristics will affect the accessing and disseminating individual emergency information. Then, we conduct a simulation experiment based on methanol leakage in a rural community. Through comparative experiments, we found that the traditional model may be too pessimistic in estimating emergency information dissemination results, underestimating shadow evacuation. In noncompliance evacuation areas, loudspeakers can inhibit individuals from unnecessarily evacuating who are close to it, and may cause individuals far away from it to evacuate unnecessarily. When formulating emergency response strategies, managers should focus on groups with weak access to information and consider the impact of loudspeaker locations on individual emergency response actions.