Skip to main content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Pedestrian evacuation modeling to reduce vehicle use for distant tsunami evacuations in Hawaiʻi

April 26, 2018

Tsunami waves that arrive hours after generation elsewhere pose logistical challenges to emergency managers due to the perceived abundance of time and inclination of evacuees to use vehicles. We use coastal communities on the island of Oʻahu (Hawaiʻi, USA) to demonstrate regional evacuation modeling that can identify where successful pedestrian-based evacuations are plausible and where vehicle use could be discouraged. The island of Oʻahu has two tsunami-evacuation zones (standard and extreme), which provides the opportunity to examine if recommended travel modes vary based on zone. Geospatial path distance models are applied to estimate population exposure as a function of pedestrian travel time and speed out of evacuation zones. The use of the extreme zone triples the number of residents, employees, and facilities serving at-risk populations that would be encouraged to evacuate and slightly reduces the percentage of residents (98–76%) that could evacuate in less than 15 min at a plausible speed (with similar percentages for employees). Areas with lengthy evacuations are concentrated in the North Shore region for the standard zone but found all around the Oʻahu coastline for the extreme zone. The use of the extreme zone results in a 26% increase in the number of hotel visitors that would be encouraged to evacuate, and a 76% increase in the number of them that may require more than 15 min. Modeling can identify where pedestrian evacuations are plausible; however, there are logistical and behavioral issues that warrant attention before localized evacuation procedures may be realistic.

Publication Year 2018
Title Pedestrian evacuation modeling to reduce vehicle use for distant tsunami evacuations in Hawaiʻi
DOI 10.1016/j.ijdrr.2018.03.009
Authors Nathan J. Wood, Jamie Jones, Jeff Peters, Kevin Richards
Publication Type Article
Publication Subtype Journal Article
Series Title International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction
Index ID 70196715
Record Source USGS Publications Warehouse
USGS Organization Western Geographic Science Center