Incorporating inland flooding into hurricane evacuation decision support modeling

Abstract

Formal engineering hurricane evacuation studies have not typically considered inland flooding explicitly, though it has been shown repeatedly to be a major cause of damage and loss of life in hurricanes. In addition, coastal flooding and strong winds are often treated in a decoupled manner, so that the correlation between them is not captured. The recently introduced Integrated Scenario-based Evacuation (ISE) computational framework offers one approach to achieving evacuation decision support based on a representation of the hazard that considers coastal flooding, inland flooding, and wind in an integrated manner. Using a case study application of the ISE framework for Hurricane Matthew (2016) approaching the North Carolina coast, we evaluate the influence of including inland flooding on the resulting recommended evacuation plan (where and when official evacuation orders are to be issued) and the plan's performance in terms of risk reduction and travel time increase. Results provide insight into managing hurricane evacuation with consideration of inland flooding. They suggest that in some cases inland areas should be evacuated just as coastal areas are; the scenarios responsible for and the timing of inland flooding can differ from those for coastal areas; the response to the different hazards should be treated together as a system because they can interact in complex ways; and planning for inland flooding can help reduce risk substantially while not adding much to evacuee travel times because inland evacuees do not have to travel as far to safety.

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

“…It also includes the content, aim, and intersectionality of the message (Borowski and Stathopoulos 2020;Sorensen et al 2020). A number of techniques have been examined to analyze the problem of evacuation transportation planning during simultaneous hazards (Doan and Shaw 2019;Yang et al 2019). Techniques to determine optimal evacuation routes when limited information is known about both the evacuation demand and road capacities have also been proposed (Ng and Waller 2010;Ng and Lin 2015).…”

Spatiotemporal Variability of Tropical Cyclone Precipitation Using a High-Resolution, Gridded (0.25° × 0.25°) Dataset for the Eastern United States, 1948–2015

“…One notable example of TCP-induced flooding is Hurricane Harvey (2017), which produced record-breaking rainfall that exceeded 1500 mm in some locations in Texas (Risser and Wehner 2017;Trenberth et al 2018;Zhang et al 2018). In addition to flooding, excessive rainfall from tropical cyclones (TCs) can trigger other hazards including mass wasting along saturated slopes (e.g., Lin et al 2008;Wooten et al 2008;Antinao and Farfán 2013;Kuo et al 2013;Cogan et al 2018;Yanites et al 2018), outbreaks of infectious diseases (e.g., Lin et al 2012;Kim et al 2013;Deng et al 2015;Fredrick et al 2015;Zheng et al 2017), and infrastructure damage and failure (Guiney 2007;Czajkowski et al 2013;Mondoro and Frangopol 2018;Yang et al 2019). While excess TCP is hazardous, TCP is also an important contributor to annual water budgets in the region (Cry 1967;Knight and Davis 2007;Nogueira and Keim 2011), can expedite drought cessation (Maxwell et al 2012(Maxwell et al , 2013(Maxwell et al , 2017Kam et al 2014;Brun and Barros 2014), and can be an important abiotic control on biodiversity and ecosystem structure (Walls et al 2013;Chi et al 2015;Goulding et al 2016;Knapp et al 2016).…”

Evaluating the usefulness of VGI from Waze for the reporting of flash floods

“…Taken together, these findings point to a need to improve flash-flood warning systems, particularly for mobility-related risk, in order to improve hurricane preparedness and resilience. This should be done for landfalling as well as near-coastal cyclones, given the possibility for intense rainfall related to these types of storms to be spatially distant from the storm center 23 , 24 . Considering options for event reporting beyond the conventional government and traditional media sources will help us expand and improve flash-flood warning systems where they are needed most 25 – 29 .…”