Tools and methods to improve emergency planning for floods

Lumbroso, Darren (2024). Tools and methods to improve emergency planning for floods. PhD thesis The Open University.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.21954/ou.ro.00099500

Abstract

The aim of this research was to address how emergency planning for floods and dams can be improved to reduce loss of life. The thesis comprises nine publications. Each publication addresses research questions which feed into the overarching aim.

Publications 1 and 2 review historic flood events which occurred in England in 1953 and in France in 2010, leading to a significant loss of life, partly because of deficiencies in emergency planning. Publications 3, 4 and 5 assess how effective emergency plans for floods can reduce fatalities. Publication 3 consolidates lessons learnt from two low-income countries, Bangladesh and Cuba, where there has been an appreciable decrease in deaths from coastal surges and how these are relevant to high-income countries such as the USA. A review of the methods and tools available to increase the effectiveness of emergency plans for floods is provided in Publication 5. Publication 6 follows on from one of the overarching findings of Publications 1 to 5, which is that there is a requirement for a method via which emergency plans for floods can be assessed and improved. Publication 6 details three cases studies in England, France and The Netherlands where a method was developed and applied to assess and to improve emergency plans for floods.

Papers 7, 8 and 9 describe how an agent-based model, which represents the dynamic interaction of people, vehicles and buildings with the floodwater or mudflows, can be used to investigate different emergency planning scenarios in order to minimise the potential loss of life from different sources of flooding including dam failures. These publications show how the use of agent-based models, to investigate the emergency management options for floods, allows a counterfactual analysis to be easily undertaken. Counterfactual analysis is increasingly used in the field of emergency management because it enables emergency planners to show causal relationships between interventions. This allows interventions such as increasing the number of safe havens, use of new evacuation routes and improved early warnings to be compared with the existing situation, in the context of the risks that floods pose to people.

The research work detailed in the nine publications has informed both policy and practice. For example, Publication 3 helped to inform the US government’s policy on increasing the resilience of vulnerable coastal in the USA to floods. The agent-based model, described in Papers 7, 8 and 9, has been used to inform emergency plans for dams in Australia, Canada, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, Peru and the USA.

Overall, this series of publications points towards the need for continuous improvements in the emergency planning for low probability - high consequence flood events and the part agent-based models can play in this.

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