Evacuation and shelter in place are two common protective action measures during hazardous events that involve the release of hazardous materials. These responses are complex and require advanced planning to determine their appropriateness to reduce human exposure to hazardous materials and minimize related health risks. Evacuation and shelter in place responses were assessed for people in the ...

INTRODUCTION As Hurricane Katrina bore down on New Orleans in August 2005, the city's mandatory evacuation prompted the exodus of an estimated 80% of its 485,000 residents. According to estimates from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), at least 18 states subsequently hosted more than 200,000 evacuees. HYPOTHESIS/PROBLEM In this case study, "Operation Helping Hands" (OHH)...

The author gives the case history of an evacuation of a child care center and its temporary location at his medical center. Advance planning, he says, is the key to any emergency.

Casualties in emergency situations are often caused by panic and in cases where building evacuation is required, they are often caused by a disorganized evacuation. This has motivated us to design a two-layer indoor evacuation system that takes advantage of two technologies all people carry on them, namely, cellular phones with cameras and RFID cards. The proposed system integrates QR Code and ...

Indoor emergency response plays a critically important role in disaster management for cities, which must consider the evacuation of people in a dynamic indoor environment. The spatial model is the foundation for the specific analysis of indoor emergency responses, such as evacuations. The current spatial model for evacuation has three primary pitfalls: (1) it primarily focuses on static spatia...

OBJECTIVE Participatory action research (PAR) methodology is an effective tool in identifying and implementing risk-reduction interventions. It has been used extensively in occupational health research, but not, to our knowledge, in disaster research. A PAR framework was incorporated into the World Trade Center evacuation study, which was designed to identify the individual, organizational, and...

EvacSim is a multi-agent building evacuation simulation featuring pedestrian occupant agents occupying twodimensional continuous free-space to simulate pedestrian egress for building evaluation and evacuation planning support. We detail pedestrian model elements that govern microscopic agent movement such as personal space preservation, obstacle avoidance and moving together as a crowd. We vali...

(Original signatures are on file with official student records.) iii This dissertation is dedicated to my very supportive mother Yin Xu for her selfless love. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my academic advisor, Dr. Lee D. Han, for his mentorship during my PhD study. He really cares about my research interests and provides a lot of great ideas for my r...

In this paper we present an agent-based evacuation model which may be used to support private sector organizations with capabilities-based planning efforts surrounding likely terrorist attack scenarios. The model is distinguished by its explicit consideration of individuals with disabilities in respect to the characteristics influencing their ability to negotiate surroundings. The virtual envir...