Testing wildfire evacuation strategies and coordination plans for Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) communities in California
In the event of a wildfire, government agencies need to make quick and well-
informed decisions to ensure the safe evacuation of people. Small communities in Marin County with an intermix of residences and flammable vegetation in Wildland-Urban Interface zones often lack resources to conduct dedicated evacuation studies. Consequently, this study uses a framework of wildfire and traffic simulation to test the performance of potential evacuation strategies, including vehicle reduction via car-pooling, phased evacuation with staggered evacuation times by zones, and prohibition of street parking in four representative areas of Marin County: Woodacre Bowl, Ross Valley, Tamalpais Valley, and an area near Highway 101 and Ignacio Blvd.
Study area and hypothetical evacuation destinations
Determination of Recovery Bridge Corridors by Comparing Post EQ Network
The goal is to identify simple, yet accurate, design heuristics that can be used to determine whether a bridge should be designed to a Recovery Bridge (RB) performance standard or an Ordinary Standard Bridge (OSB) performance standard. The proposed design heuristics are based on combining and ranking a set of empirical indicators or metrics derived from one-off regional traffic simulation analysis that considers a bridge’s corridor/network dependency, damage fragility/severity, and critical facility access. The validity of the proposed design heuristics will be verified by conducting numerous HPC based “earthquake, bridge damage, traffic disruptions” scenario simulations for the road networks in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Ranking of bridges based on their importance
Collaborator: Berkeley Institute of Transportation Studies (ITS)
Researchers: Pengshun Li, Yanglan Wang, Binyu Zhao, Louise Comfort, Kenichi Soga (UC Berkeley)
Domains: Natural Hazards
Capabilities: Numerical Modeling/Simulations
Summary: CSI has collaborated with Berkeley ITS to develop wildfire evacuation strategies and coordination plans for Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) communities in California
Publications: TBA!