Quantitative assessment of evacuation measures in flood-prone areas

Abstract

Evacuation is a tool to minimize the loss of life and economic damages in flood (threat) scenarios. The Dutch programs ‘Water and Evacuation’ and ‘Wave2020’ focused on the improvement of emergency preparation. Effort has been placed to improve information management, evacuation preparation, decision making and to increase risk awareness among professionals and citizens. The question is however how to incorporate these measures into account in a quantitative risk assessment. In this paper we focus on the improvements of the departure curve by emergency planning. This research method builds on the warning guidebook and a questionnaire developed by the USACE (Mileti and Sorensen 2015) and how evacuation is taken into account in the Dutch flood risk approach (ENW 2017). In a case study the PBL method (Pleijter and Kolen 2016), a macro model to determine evacuation and loss of life is compared to LifeSim, an agent-based models. In this research we concluded that improvements in the departure curve do not result in a significant increase of effectiveness of preventive evacuation in the Netherlands because the (national) road network is already overcrowded. Only when the traffic network has free capacity left an improvement of the departure curve will increase effectiveness of evacuation.