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1. Effects of the Uncertainty of Hurricane Tracks on Coastal Hazards and Evacuations

   Yang, J. (November 2022, International journal of structural and civil engineering research)

   Hurricanes cause devastating amounts of damage to structures and infrastructure. It harms especially those coastal residents along its track. Over the last couple of years, evacuation planning for populated coastal regions has been challenging and time-consuming due to the uncertainty of the hurricane’s track. As such, with a focus on Northwest Florida, this research aims to focus on the development of evacuation scenarios for coastal communities that combines hurricane inundation and strong wind forecast and evacuation modeling. The proposed approach integrates storm surge simulation models (ADCIRC and SWAN modeling) and traffic evacuation models (Cube and TIME) by using hurricane forecasting datasets to explore the designation of evacuation zones and the calculation of evacuation clearance times in different counties. This approach was applied to three distinct scenarios with a focus on possible populated coastal cities that Hurricane Michael would have hit in 2018. Selected cities are Pensacola, Destin, and Panama City. This type of approach has the potential to help agencies make more informed decisions on evacuations using the accuracy and timeliness of forecasts and provide safer evacuations in coastal areas by avoiding the traffic jams on evacuation routes. 

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2. Spatial Accessibility Analysis of Emergency Shelters with a Consideration of Sea Level Rise in Northwest Florida

   https://doi.org/10.3390/su151310263  

   Yang, Jieya; Alisan, Onur; Ma, Mengdi; Ozguven, Eren Erman; Huang, Wenrui; Vijayan, Linoj (July 2023, Sustainability)

   Hurricane-induced storm surge and flooding often lead to the closures of evacuation routes, which can be disruptive for the victims trying to leave the impacted region. This problem becomes even more challenging when we consider the impact of sea level rise that happens due to global warming and other climate-related factors. As such, hurricane-induced storm surge elevations would increase nonlinearly when sea level rise lifts, flooding access to highways and bridge entrances, thereby reducing accessibility for affected census block groups to evacuate to hurricane shelters during hurricane landfall. This happened with the Category 5 Hurricane Michael which swept the east coast of Northwest Florida with long-lasting damage and impact on local communities and infrastructure. In this paper, we propose an integrated methodology that utilizes both sea level rise (SLR) scenario-informed storm surge simulations and floating catchment area models built in Geographical Information Systems (GIS). First, we set up sea level rise scenarios of 0, 0.5, 1, and 1.5 m with a focus on Hurricane Michael’s impact that led to the development of storm surge models. Second, these storm surge simulation outputs are fed into ArcGIS and floating catchment area-based scenarios are created to study the accessibility of shelters. Findings indicate that rural areas lost accessibility faster than urban areas due to a variety of factors including shelter distributions, and roadway closures as spatial accessibility to shelters for offshore populations was rapidly diminishing. We also observed that as inundation level increases, urban census block groups that are closer to the shelters get extremely high accessibility scores through FCA calculations compared to the other block groups. Results of this study could guide and help revise existing strategies for designing emergency response plans and update resilience action policies. 

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3. Planning for Special Needs Shelters: A Hurricane Track Uncertainty-Based Approach Integrating Coastal Inundation and Accessibility

   Yang, J. (January 2023, Transportation Research Board Conference)

   Storm surge and evacuation traffic under the observed track of Hurricane Michael (2018) showed clear accessibility and evacuation challenges for Panama City, Florida although the city was not hit directly. Since a possible Hurricane Michael track within National Hurricane Center (NHC)'s forecasted hurricane cone was Panama City, this paper tries to answer the following questions: What if Hurricane Michael hit Panama City directly? How would the special needs populations and their accessibility to Special Needs Shelters (SpNS) be impacted, and what could have been done to alleviate this impact? A previously validated storm surge model was used to predict storm surge inundations under this different hurricane track. Based on the impact of these coastal inundations, a GIS-based optimization methodology was developed to evaluate the accessibility and siting of special needs shelters. Results indicate that if Hurricane Michael had shifted to Panama City in 2018, most of the coastal region of Panama City would have been inundated, compelling residents to evacuate. The possible landfall of Michael in this simulation would also lead to a maximum storm surge of 5 to 6 m on the coast, which is above FEMA's 100-year flood elevation. In addition, the only evacuation route out of Panama City area, when the bridges with their access roads were flooded, was US 231. This would have been life-threatening since there is only one SpNS in the north of the city accessible by this roadway. The proposed analysis studies the accessibility of this SpNS shelter and provides a reasonable approach for SpNS shelter siting or repurposing regular shelters for this purpose based on the hypothesized travel time most likely to be experienced on roadway networks based on the impact of Hurricane Michael. Emergency plans can be updated by the results of this optimization model, which can locate additional sites or shelter locations while minimizing the travel costs and integrating the impact of storm surge modeling and transportation accessibility analysis. 

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4. How Do Cities Flow in an Emergency? Tracing Human Mobility Patterns during a Natural Disaster with Big Data and Geospatial Data Science

   https://doi.org/10.3390/urbansci3020051  

   Han, Su Yeon; Tsou, Ming-Hsiang; Knaap, Elijah; Rey, Sergio; Cao, Guofeng (June 2019, Urban Science)

   Understanding human movements in the face of natural disasters is critical for disaster evacuation planning, management, and relief. Despite the clear need for such work, these studies are rare in the literature due to the lack of available data measuring spatiotemporal mobility patterns during actual disasters. This study explores the spatiotemporal patterns of evacuation travels by leveraging users’ location information from millions of tweets posted in the hours prior and concurrent to Hurricane Matthew. Our analysis yields several practical insights, including the following: (1) We identified trajectories of Twitter users moving out of evacuation zones once the evacuation was ordered and then returning home after the hurricane passed. (2) Evacuation zone residents produced an unusually large number of tweets outside evacuation zones during the evacuation order period. (3) It took several days for the evacuees in both South Carolina and Georgia to leave their residential areas after the mandatory evacuation was ordered, but Georgia residents typically took more time to return home. (4) Evacuees are more likely to choose larger cities farther away as their destinations for safety instead of nearby small cities. (5) Human movements during the evacuation follow a log-normal distribution. 

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5. Spatial Accessibility Analysis of Emergency Shelters with a Consideration of Sea Level Rise in Northwest Florida

   Yang, Jieya (June 2023, Sustainability)

   Hurricane-induced storm surge and flooding often lead to the closures of evacuation routes, which can be disruptive for the victims trying to leave the impacted region. This problem becomes even more challenging when we consider the impact of sea level rise that happens due to global warming and other climate-related factors. As such, hurricane-induced storm surge elevations would increase nonlinearly when sea level rise lifts, flooding access to highways and bridge entrances, thereby reducing accessibility for affected census block groups to evacuate to hurricane shelters during hurricane landfall. This happened with the Category 5 Hurricane Michael which swept the east coast of Northwest Florida with long-lasting damage and impact on local communities and infrastructure. In this paper, we propose an integrated methodology that utilizes both sea level rise (SLR) scenario-informed storm surge simulations and floating catchment area models built in Geographical Information Systems (GIS). First, we set up sea level rise scenarios of 0, 0.5, 1, and 1.5 m with a focus on Hurricane Michael’s impact that led to the development of storm surge models. Second, these storm surge simulation outputs are fed into ArcGIS and floating catchment area-based scenarios are created to study the accessibility of shelters. Findings indicate that rural areas lost accessibility faster than urban areas due to a variety of factors including shelter distributions, and roadway closures as spatial accessibility to shelters for offshore populations was rapidly diminishing. We also observed that as inundation level increases, urban census block groups that are closer to the shelters get extremely high accessibility scores through FCA calculations compared to the other block groups. Results of this study could guide and help revise existing strategies for designing emergency response plans and update resilience action policies 

   more » « less