jaue2016027: Feasibility of Car Evacuation from Tsunami in the Coastal Region

Abstract

here are a number of regions that occurs massive earthquakes which hypocenter is oceans near around East and South Asia. Also, the importance of tsunami countermeasures is becoming recognized with the promotion of tourist development and population increase. Also in Japan, the number of deaths and missing people were about 18,000 people on the Great East Japan Earthquake (2011.3.11). The usage of cars for evacuation has been principally prohibited in Japan, because of the dangerousness for causing traffic jams or traffic accidents. However, on the Great East Japan Earthquake, it was confirmed that many evacuees selected cars to evacuate.
In this paper, we simulated tsunami evacuation by cars, comparing with the evacuation by foot, and considered effectiveness of utilizing cars in the case of tsunami. As a result, we found that it is possible to shorten evacuation complete time by increasing new evacuation roads and destinations. However, assuming a real town where will be inundated with tsunami, we need to make advanced tsunami evacuation planning by limiting the number of cars for evacuation and equipping tsunami refuge buildings.