Pre-Disaster Identification of Evacuation Destinations to Support Provincial-Level Emergency Management Planning
Creators: Ohi, Sabrena Jahan
Publisher: name: University of Alberta Library
Year: 2023

<p>The unpredictability of natural events like wildfires and earthquakes, and how they impact human settlements, often results in short- and no-notice evacuations, and can sometimes lead to evacuees being displaced for weeks if not months (and sometimes, years). One key issue of concern is where evacuees should go to reach safety, and access medical assistance, emergency supplies, and temporary shelter. The important decision of identifying these destinations is usually made operationally, either just before or when an evacuation order is called, due to the highly uncertain and rapidly changing nature of disasters like wildfires. Identification of these destinations is difficult across a large jurisdiction such as a state or province, where many communities within the jurisdiction may be under threat of wildfire, but it is entirely unknown if and where they will occur during the season. However, if potential destination communities can be identified prior to the wildfire season, in pre-disaster planning efforts that consider community suitability to host evacuees and community access to supplies from larger urban centres, evacuations can benefit from reduced decision burdens of local governments directing evacuations and the larger jurisdictions that support local governments in this work.<br>
The main objective of this thesis is to develop knowledge around supporting emergency evacuation planning, specifically where and how to direct evacuees from (mainly smaller, rural) communities to safety in wildfire evacuations. Two sub-objectives support this main objective. The first is to identify a network of potential wildfire host communities across a large jurisdiction, as part of pre-wildfire season planning and preparation efforts – not knowing if, where, and when wildfires will occur within that region. The second is to identify capacity-restricted routes between potentially evacuating communities and pre-identified host communities.<br>
For the first objective, a multi-objective facility location model is developed to identify potential wildfire evacuation host community locations across Alberta. A Pareto frontier of optimal solutions is identified, and clustering analysis is used to further understand the solution set. It is found that with 13 host communities, more than 90% of the wildfire-prone population (excluding those of one urbanized region) is “covered” by at least one of the 13 host communities. Options for the remaining “uncovered” communities are also explored. <br>
For the second objective, two measures called Escape Capacity Criticality and Max-flow Impact Index are introduced. They are used to determine the contribution of roadway facilities to network bottleneck capacity between an evacuating community and a destination community. Results suggest that Level 2 Highways in the immediate vicinities of communities are most critical. <br>
In the event of a short- and no-notice community evacuation, decision-makers make many important decisions in a short timespan. Identifying potential host communities before the annual wildfire season can help reduce decision burdens and ease coordination between emergency managers. It can support further decisions such as evacuation route identification, and centralized emergency logistics planning (plans for how supplies and other relief are distributed). With the frequencies and intensities of wildfires increasing in western Canada and other parts of the world, evacuation pre-planning and readiness continue to be of great concern in the protection of human safety.</p>