Emergency and evacuation management strategies in earthquakes: towards holistic and user-centered methodologies for their design and evaluation

Bernardini, Gabriele; Ferreira, Tiago Miguel

doi:10.1016/b978-0-12-824071-7.00002-0

Cited by 8 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 70 publications

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“…Previous works pointed out how the analysis of the risk conditions of public open spaces in the historical built environment, mainly squares, should be based on reliable scenario creation in terms of the physical features, hazards and users' exposure and social/individual vulnerability [48,60,61]. Some efforts in terms of simulation-based risk assessment in a specific public open space in the urban built environment have been carried out [60,62,63]. However, squares are limitedly investigated in this sense.…”

Section: Typologies Of Squares Prone To Terrorist Acts In the Italian...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Then, the key performance indicators are considered to assess the users' risk, taking advantage of suggestions from previous research on evacuation analyses for both terrorist acts and other kinds of emergencies affecting the built environment (e.g., general purposes, fires, earthquakes), including those related to typological applications [43,45,47,60,63,83,86,93]. The selected indicators range from 0 (safety) to 1 (risk), thus being expressed according to normalization rules and allowing comparison of the different input scenarios on the same scale of effects.…”

Section: Simulation Criteria and Key Performance Indicators For Risk ...mentioning

confidence: 99%

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How Could Increasing Temperature Scenarios Alter the Risk of Terrorist Acts in Different Historical Squares? A Simulation-Based Approach in Typological Italian Squares

2023

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Squares in the urban historical built environment are public open spaces prone to the risk of terrorist acts, essentially because they are ideal soft targets and attract significant user densities. Risk assessment methods should consider how users behave in them, both before and during an accident (i.e., the evacuation process). In addition to squares’ morphology and layout, and considering that urban areas are more and more prone to the effects of increasing temperatures, outdoor climate conditions can alter the initial scenario. In fact, such conditions can lead users to gather in specific outdoor areas, where they can look for shadows and shelter. This work hence proposes a simulation-based approach to assess how differences in users’ behaviours in response to increasing temperatures and squares’ morphology can alter the risk of terrorist acts in an emergency evacuation. An agent-based model is developed to simulate the interactions between users, hazards and the historical built environment. The work considers four typological squares prone to terrorist acts since they host a special building attracting users in front of it. These squares are derived from the analysis of Italian historical contexts within the BE S2ECURe project. Users are generated in the public open space (thus, before the terrorist act) depending on the intended uses of the square and on the outdoor temperature, which is affected by the square’s morphology. Three different users’ behaviours are modelled to consider (or not) the effects of the outdoor temperature on users’ thermal acceptability levels in an increasing temperature situation. Then, two evacuation scenarios are simulated: (a) a general evacuation process, without attackers, as the baseline for the risk assessment; and (b) an armed assault with cold weapons, to define one of the most probable attack situations in open spaces. Evacuation performance indicators are developed to assess users’ risk. Preliminary verifications demonstrate the capabilities of the approach. The results show that higher differences in evacuation indicators are noticed in large and asymmetric squares, since their conditions highly affect the variability of users’ behaviours in response to increasing temperatures. At the same time, stronger safety behaviours in response to increasing temperatures could reduce emergency issues because they allow users to be more dispersed and initially placed farther from the attack area. Decision-makers could take advantage of the proposed approach and simulation tool, moving towards an effectiveness analysis of solutions to increase the thermal comfort of users in respect of the risk levels during an evacuation. Finally, applications to real-world scenarios are thus encouraged to compare such idealized results with effective conditions.

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Section: Typologies Of Squares Prone To Terrorist Acts In the Italian...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Simulation Criteria and Key Performance Indicators For Risk ...mentioning

confidence: 99%

How Could Increasing Temperature Scenarios Alter the Risk of Terrorist Acts in Different Historical Squares? A Simulation-Based Approach in Typological Italian Squares

2023

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“…Another relevant application of index-based approaches is to analyse the potential accumulation of debris resulting from the partial or global collapse of buildings, which can compromise pedestrian safety in post-earthquake scenarios, see Figure 6. Based on such results, decision-makers can base their decisions on the knowledge of the urban areas that can be potentially inaccessible, which routes can constitute alternatives for evacuation purposes, and where debris removal actions should be concentrated (Bernardini and Ferreira, 2022). Furthermore, urban evacuation scenarios are privileged tools to promote awareness-raising actions among the general population.…”

Section: Earthquakementioning

confidence: 99%

Assessing and Managing Risk in Historic Urban Areas: Current Trends and Future Research Directions

Ferreira

Eudave

2022

Front. Earth Sci.

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Historic urban centres are, almost by definition, risk-prone areas. The buildings in the historical sites are often highly vulnerable to natural and human-made hazards, not only due to their construction and material characteristics but also because they are usually very degraded due to ineffective maintenance and conservation policies. Moreover, the recent world tourism boom has led to a significant increase in the number of people who live, work and visit these areas, which, together with land use and climate change-related impacts, make historic centres particularly exposed areas. This paper addresses the issue of assessing and managing risk in historic urban centres departing from the complexity of defining the historic city and the concept of risk, providing a comprehensive discussion on current trends and future research directions in this field. After analysing the most suitable methodologies to assess the vulnerability of these areas to different hazards, the focus is on data collection and organisation-related issues and how the different vulnerability assessment outputs can be used to manage and mitigate risk. Vulnerability and loss scenarios, evacuation and emergency planning, and retrofit and cost-benefit analyses are some of the aspects addressed herein. This discussion includes some considerations on the accuracy of these approaches and aspects related to their calibration and validation, covering from empirical calibration models to advanced artificial Intelligence-based techniques.

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“…During the 2008 M8 Wenchuan earthquake, the buildings along the fault-ruptured area were all significantly destroyed because of sudden fault rupturing (Xu et al, 2009). Moreover, open space damage caused by shaking and collapsed buildings can indirectly impede evacuation and rescue in the immediate aftermath (Francini et al, 2020;Bernardini and Ferreira, 2022). Dramatic destruction due to fault rupturing and strong ground motion can significantly impede emergency evacuations.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Earthquake scenario-specific framework for spatial accessibility analysis (SAA) of emergency shelters: a case study in Xichang City, Sichuan Province, China

Wang,

Cheng,

2024

Front. Earth Sci.

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The spatial accessibility of emergency shelters, indicating the difficulty of evacuation and rescue, is crucial for disaster mitigation and emergency management. To analyze accessibility, an effective approach is to evaluate the service capacity of emergency shelters. Multifaceted factors were employed to enhance the quantitative accuracy of accessibility indicators. However, scenario-specific analysis has not been emphasized. Considering the devastating potential of great earthquake disasters, we cannot ignore the impact of these scenarios on emergency shelter accessibility, especially in areas with high seismic risk. In this study, we developed an earthquake scenario-specific framework for spatial accessibility analysis (SAA), which integrates the service capacity of emergency shelters and the impact of strong ground motion and fault rupturing. We applied this framework to the urban area of Xichang City in Sichuan Province, western China. Xichang City, located in the linked area of the Anninghe fault and Zemuhe fault with many extreme historical earthquake disaster records, is prone to high seismic risk. We firstly collected emergency shelter and road network data in Xichang City. We then applied SAA based on the road network, using the network analysis method. After that, we analyzed the impact of strong ground motion on accessibility and generated the setback zone of fault rupturing. We integrated the effect of strong ground motion on accessibility within the setback zone of active faults. Finally, we generated a comprehensive accessibility map, considering both the predicted strong ground motion and potential fault rupturing. Our results show that the accessibility level changed in several towns of urban Xichang City due to strong ground motion and fault rupturing. The accessibility level decreased in Lizhou, Xingsheng, and Anning Towns. For areas with mapped fault lines, the accessibility level is Very-Low. Our results demonstrate the impact of earthquake damage on the accessibility of emergency shelters and the complexity of evacuation in earthquake scenarios. In general, we added earthquake rupturing and ground motion characteristics into the SAA framework. This framework will help us enhance the reliability of SAA and the feasibility of seismic vulnerability evaluation.

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Emergency and evacuation management strategies in earthquakes: towards holistic and user-centered methodologies for their design and evaluation

Cited by 8 publications

References 70 publications

How Could Increasing Temperature Scenarios Alter the Risk of Terrorist Acts in Different Historical Squares? A Simulation-Based Approach in Typological Italian Squares

How Could Increasing Temperature Scenarios Alter the Risk of Terrorist Acts in Different Historical Squares? A Simulation-Based Approach in Typological Italian Squares

Assessing and Managing Risk in Historic Urban Areas: Current Trends and Future Research Directions

Earthquake scenario-specific framework for spatial accessibility analysis (SAA) of emergency shelters: a case study in Xichang City, Sichuan Province, China

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