TSUNAMI CASUALTY ESTIMATION CONSIDERING INTENDED EVACUATION BEHAVIOR OF LOCAL RESIDENTS AND VISITORS

Tsunamis could cause devastating damage to vast coastal areas. In order to understand tsunami hazards in a certain area, it is important to assess the potential casualties that can result from a given event. Although many studies related to tsunami casualty estimations exist, most of them have not taken detailed evacuation behavior of at-risk individuals into account. For instance, although people have been found to have a variety of triggers that can prompt them to evacuate (e.g. feeling earthquake shaking, seeing others evacuating), to the authors’ knowledge these effects have been ignored when conducting an estimation of the numbers of potential casualties. For some coastal areas, during a tsunami large number of visitors could be present, who have less knowledge about the locations of safe places. Nevertheless, there has also been little consideration regarding their presence and behavior. In this study, an advanced approach for estimating the number of tsunami casualties is presented and applied to Yuigahama Beach, Kamakura City, Japan, which has a high risk of tsunami and large number of tourists throughout the whole year.

An Integrated Simulation of Tsunami Hazard and Human Evacuation in La Punta, Peru

The 2011 Great East Japan earthquake and tsunami was a magnitude 9.0 Mw event that destroyed most structural tsunami countermeasures. However, approximately 90% of the estimated population at risk from the tsunami survived due to a rapid evacuation to higher ground or inland. Thus, tsunami evacuation is the most effective measure to reduce casualties. In this paper, we applied a new developed evacuation model integrated with the numerical simulation of tsunami for casualty estimation. This tool is to support decisions in disaster management and disaster prevention education. The model was developed in NetLogo, a multi-agent programming language and modeling environment for simulating complex phenomena. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) datasets are used as spatial input information for road and shelter locations. The TUNAMI model of Tohoku University is used for the integration of tsunami numerical simulation results. In this paper, the study is performed in a tsunami threatened urban area of Callao, Peru, called La Punta. Results show the various contributions of the model to disaster management and scenario analysis. Among the contributions are the casualty estimation in a tsunami risk area and the analysis of the spatial distribution of vertical evacuation shelters.