Abstract
Tsunami evacuation simulations are often used to determine necessary countermeasures that will reduce human loss effectively after earthquakes and subsequent tsunamis. However, so far there has been no simulation for the estimated building damage using up-to-date knowledge of seismic engineering. In this study, in order to clarify the effect of building damage on a tsunami evacuation, we first predicted building damage based on the nonlinear response analysis for a realistic strong ground motion and then simulated a tsunami evacuation considering road blockage due to the collapsed buildings. We used one district in Tanabe City in Wakayama Prefecture in Japan where we expect to have a 12 m of tsunami height after an earthquake along the Nankai Trough plate boundary. We found that the prepared capacity of evacuation sites is not enough to let everyone evacuate and that the number of survivors increases by 3–4% if all of the buildings and houses are seismically reinforced. Considering this, plus 1% of expected casualties inside the collapsed houses, it appears to be not as efficient to reinforce buildings and houses to prevent human loss in comparison with increasing the capacity of tsunami evacuation sites in the target district. However, the damage to building and houses will cause a lot of side effects which are not considered here, but will prolong the evacuation time. Thus, we concluded that we need to reinforce the buildings and houses as well as consider the appropriate placement, number, and capacity of the evacuation sites.
Highlights
Given the imminent occurrence of an earthquake or earthquakes along the Nankai Trough plate boundary, developing effective countermeasures has become an urgent priority on the southwestern side of Japan
They performed the tsunami evacuation simulation in the area damaged by the 1993 Hokkaido–Nansei–Oki earthquake for future evacuation planning, and they showed that the result was validated by the detailed surveys just after the earthquake
Parameters used for the simulation were as follows: tsunami data, number and initial positions of residents, position and capacity of evacuation sites, walking speed, and number and locations of collapsed buildings
Summary
Given the imminent occurrence of an earthquake or earthquakes along the Nankai Trough plate boundary, developing effective countermeasures has become an urgent priority on the southwestern side of Japan. Among them, Goto et al (2012) assumed that the walking speed as well as the motorcycle speed decreased with increased density and simulated the cases with different ratios between pedestrians and motorcycles. They presented the simulation to the elementary, middle, and high school students in the target area as a course of disaster education and proved that their simulations made easy for students to understand the appropriate evacuation procedure. Based on such progress, Hori et al (2015) considered that there remains uncertainty in these tsunami evacuation simulations and suggested a way to evaluate the quality of the simulation
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