Evaluating Emergency Response Activities during Earthquakes in Local Cities of Japan

Abstract

Abstract:This study attempts to develop a method to evaluate the difficulty of emergency response activities in densely built-up areas, focusing on practical usefulness and issues in local cities of Japan. The emergency response activities are classified into evacuation, firefighting, and rescue, based on previous research. The method evaluates the difficulty of the activities by calculating the non-arrival probability and arrival distance for each building, using physical condition data. The developed method is applied to case study districts in Japanese local cities that have disaster mitigation issues. From spatial and quantitative analysis using evaluation results of the emergency response activities, we found that the difficulty of the activities in local cities is relatively low compared with results obtained in previous research dealing with densely built-up areas in big cities such as Tokyo and Osaka. Finally, we discuss the possibility of the proposed method as a support tool for community-based planning for disaster mitigation that can plainly offer residents useful information about the difficulty of the response activities.