Changing Logistics of Evacuation Transportation in Hazardous Settings during COVID-19

Abstract

The logistics of public-sponsored evacuation include transportation assets, personnel, and infrastructure. Effective orchestration leading up to a severe weather event is a complex undertaking requiring capacity that is matched to needs. However, under the compound hurricane-pandemic scenario, the demands for evacuation assistance and the capacity to meet demands change. Pre-event planning must be adjusted and transit modified to reduce risks posed to evacuees and essential workers. This study explores how visualizations of redistributed vulnerability and transportation resources influence planning. The research identifies how transportation, emergency management, and public health officials are adapting hurricane evacuation resources during the COVID-19 pandemic using original data from compound hazard workshops and participatory stakeholder focus groups. Findings show that by the peak of hurricane season, local evacuation recommendations were favored by officials, contracts were in place for noncongregate options, and public resources were adjusted to account for those requiring congregate sheltering. A need remained for coordinating interjurisdictional information about real-time weather, resources, staffing, and traffic as well as local knowledge of roadway flooding with ongoing hazard planning.

Resilience to hazards overlapping a pandemic: A shelter resource stabilization model

“…Emergency managers and public health officials expressed particular concern for populations with health, age, race, and income vulnerabilities exacerbated by the increased likelihood of severe illness associated with COVID-19 that may contract the virus in congregate shelters (Whytlaw et al 2021). Lack of trust in government, limited access to transportation, and other resource issues also reduce the effectiveness of COVID-19 mitigation for vulnerable populations in need of public emergency shelters (Hill et al 2021; Wright II and Merritt 2020). For example, lockdowns disproportionately affect vulnerable populations already experiencing food insecurity, homelessness, reduced access to health care, limited social capital, and historical exclusion from participating and engaging with the government (Wright III and Merritt 2020).…”

“…The government responded with state and local emergency public health authorizations and unprecedented financial relief, such as the federal Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act (Autor et al 2022). Emergency shelter providers attempted to maintain service quality by adapting revenue and workforce stabilization strategies as vaccines were developed, approved, and distributed (Hill et al 2021; Maher, Hoang, and Hindery 2020; Whytlaw et al 2021).…”

Evacuation behavior of households facing compound hurricane‐pandemic threats

“…Research is emerging that looks at hurricane response during the COVID‐19 pandemic (Botzen et al, 2022; Collins et al, 2021; Collins, Polen, Dunn, Jernigan, et al, 2022; Collins, Polen, Dunn, Maas, et al, 2022; Hill et al, 2021), but more is needed to understand households' evacuation behavior to develop responsive and equitable policies, processes, and practices. This study focused on households' prospective evacuation behavior when facing threats of a hurricane during a pandemic and identified equity implications for disaster management.…”

“…Fears of contracting COVID‐19 within evacuation environments may change the decisions of households that would otherwise evacuate and move away from areas at physical risk. Financial strain from the pandemic could make households less likely to evacuate given the needed resources of doing so (Hill et al, 2021; Whytlaw et al, 2021).…”

Evacuation in Buildings Based on BIM: Taking a Fire in a University Library as an Example

“…Ruggiero Lovreglio et al provided new pre-evacuation data collected in four evacuations of the same university library and illustrated that unplanned evacuations had higher pre-evacuation times [ 8 ]. At present, scholars at home and abroad have conducted extensive research on the problem of evacuation in public places, mainly focusing on performance-based fire protection design [ 9 , 10 , 11 ], planning escape routes based on algorithm models [ 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 ], the impact of fire smoke spread on evacuation [ 16 , 17 , 18 , 19 ], changes in psychological characteristics and behavior of personnel during evacuation [ 20 , 21 , 22 , 23 ], and so on. In terms of performance-based fire protection design, Khorasani et al provide a comparative analysis of the fire performance of a floor system designed following prescriptive- and performance-based approaches [ 24 ].…”