Loss of Life, Evacuation and Emergency Management: Comparison and Application to Case Studies in the USA.

摘要

Both in the USA and in the Netherlands extensive studies on approaches for identifying flood risks the combination of levee failure probabilities and consequences -are ongoing. The outcomes of these methods will provide a better insight in the actual level of risk and contribute to a better and more cost and time efficient prioritization of risk reduction actions. In recent years there has been a lot of information exchanged between experts from the Netherlands and the USA on these topics, e.g. within the Memorandum of Understanding between USACE and Rijkswaterstaat and several other meetings in the US and the Netherlands. One topic that has received a lot attention in recent years is the (estimation of) loss of life due flooding and the associated risks. Historical events, such as the 1953 flooding in the Netherlands and the flooding of New Orleans due to hurricane Katrina, have demonstrated that life loss can be significant. Both in the US methods have been developed to estimate these consequences, and in both countries life loss will be considered in (future) policies and decision-making. It is therefore important that credible and reliable methods are available to analyse this type of consequences. Various methods have been developed in the Netherlands, US and other countries for various fields of application such as levee failure, dam breaching and tsunamis. Although these methods provide first insights in the range of loss of life that could be expected, there are still a lot of questions related to the empirical foundation of these methods and their application for policy decisions. A related topic concerns evacuation and emergency management (EEM). The risks to life are directly influenced by the effectiveness of EEM. One challenge is to improve estimates of and insights in evacuation effectiveness, based on empirical data and the joint research efforts of social scientists and more engineering related research.