All of Aotearoa’s coastline is at risk of tsunami: 430,000 people (9% of population) live within tsunami evacuation zones and need to evacuate quickly following long-or-strong earthquake shaking. However, evacuating many people at once is challenging, especially with earthquake damage present. In smaller towns, evacuation drills can identify evacuation problems (and thus remedies), but full-scale drills are impractical in large settlements. Yet achieving effective evacuations is crucial: in Japan in 2011, where evacuation was well-prepared for, the fatality rate among tsunami-exposed communities was 2-8%; whereas in Aceh in 2004, where evacuation was not well-planned for, fatality rates were 14-24%.
The team will further develop existing software for simulation of evacuation to include both evacuation on foot and in vehicles (multimodal) in a crisis following tsunami alerts. Furthermore, the simulations will be visualised using Virtual Reality techniques.
This research will be central to informing robust evacuation plans. This includes identifying challenges during evacuation (such as congestion) and guide where improvements can be made (such as identifying where vertical evacuation structures such as tall buildings are best placed). Once this method is developed for the case study locations in the project, it can later be applied to cities across New Zealand. Many of these techniques will also be transferable to other hazard-related evacuations, such as for volcanic events and wildfire.
The funding covers a three year period.
The Head of Department at the Department of Civil and Natural Resources, University of Canterbury Professor Daniel Nilsson says “This is a unique project in which a multimodal tsunami evacuation model will be developed. This model will help us plan and build safer cities in the future.”
