Emergency Evacuation Behavior in Small Island Developing States: Hurricane Irma in Sint Maarten

Disasters triggered by natural hazards are becoming more frequent and more intense, causing damage to infrastructure and causing loss of life. One way to reduce disaster risk is by evacuating the hazardous area. However, despite the amount of literature that exists on evacuation behavior, there is still a lack of agreement on which variables...

Optimization of firefighting strategies in process plants with emphasis on domino effects and safe evacuation

Effective firefighting and evacuation are integral parts of emergency response plans in process plants, which play a key role in protecting human lives and assets in the event of major fires. Given sufficient firefighting resources, firefighters would suppress all the burning vessels and cool off all the exposed vessels in order to contain the...

Hurricane Harvey Report: A fact-finding effort in the direct aftermath of Hurricane Harvey in the Greater Houston Region

On August 25, 2017, Hurricane Harvey made landfall near Rockport, Texas as a Category 4 hurricane with maximum sustained winds of approximately 200 km/hour. Harvey caused severe damages in coastal Texas due to extreme winds and storm surge, but will go down in history for record-setting rainfall totals and flood-related damages. Across large...

Dynamic Routing during Disaster Events

Innovations in mobile technology allow people to request route information on their smartphone to reach safe areas during emergency and disaster evacuations. In return, the affected people in the field can send their observation reports, e.g. using a dedicated icon-based disaster language. However, given the turbulent nature of disaster...

Randvoorwaarden verticale evacuatie bij overstromingen

In this research vertical evacuation is defined as the displacement of people to dry floors in buildings or public shelters that are located inside the threatened or flooded area. Vertical evacuation strategies can be implemented in combination with, or as an alternative to, preventive evacuate in case preventive evacuation is not entirely...

Integrated risk assessment for the natomas basin (California) analysis of loss of life and emergency management for floods

This article assesses the risk to life for the Natomas Basin, a low-lying, rapidly urbanizing region in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta in California. Using an empirical method, the loss of life is determined for a flood (high water), seismic, and sunny-day levee breach scenario. The analysis indicated that more than 1000 fatalities may occur...

Transportation Modelling for Regional Evacuations

Regional evacuation planning is complex and timely. These planning studies can be assisted by a transportation model. In this thesis, we investigate the requirements for such a model, and develop, implement, and test a new model, called EVAQ, which meets these requirements. Two case studies show how EVAQ can be used to assess the success and...

Modelling Traveller Behaviour under Emergency Evacuation Conditions

Dynamic traffic simulation models are frequently used to support decisions when planning an evacuation. This paper focuses on limitations in the modelling of travellers’ behaviour with respect to traffic information and compliance to evacuation instructions. More specifically, we propose a model framework where the traffic simulation is executed...

A review on travel behaviour modelling in dynamic traffic simulation models for evacuations

Dynamic traffic simulation models are frequently used to support decisions when planning an evacuation. This contribution reviews the different (mathematical) model formulations underlying these traffic simulation models used in evacuation studies and the behavioural assumptions that are made. The appropriateness of these behavioural assumptions...

Field research concerning contra-flow as a measure for massive evacuation

The present study concerns a practice test that aimed at investigating to what extent contra flow or reverse laning (Dutch: tegenverkeer) works well in the Netherlands and how participating car drivers evaluate it. Reverse laning may be a solution for a capacity problem in case all lanes of roads are needed to evacuate large areas. To that end,...

Analysis of near-optimal evacuation instructions

In this paper, approximations of optimal evacuation instructions are analyzed. The instructions, consisting of a departure time, a destination, and a route, are for the evacuation by car of a population of a region threatened by a hazard. An optimization method presented in earlier research is applied on three different hazard scenarios...

A generic method to optimize instructions for the control of evacuations

A method is described to develop a set of optimal instructions to evacuate by car the population of a region threatened by a hazard. By giving these instructions to the evacuees, traffic conditions and therefore the evacuation efficiency can be optimized. The instructions, containing a departure time, a destination, and a route, are created...