Loughborough University
Browse
nhess-17-1-2017.pdf (21.11 MB)

City-scale accessibility of emergency responders operating during flood events

Download (21.11 MB)
journal contribution
posted on 2016-12-16, 11:13 authored by Daniel Green, Dapeng YuDapeng Yu, Ian Pattison, Robert WilbyRobert Wilby, Lee Bosher, Ramila Patel, Philip Thompson, Keith Trowell, Julia Draycon, Martin Halse, Lili Yang, Tim Ryley
Emergency responders often have to operate and respond to emergency situations during dynamic weather conditions, including floods. This paper demonstrates a novel method using existing tools and datasets to evaluate emergency responder accessibility during flood events within the city of Leicester, UK. Accessibility was quantified using the 8 and 10 min legislative targets for emergency provision for the ambulance and fire and rescue services respectively under "normal" no-flood conditions, as well as flood scenarios of various magnitudes (1 in 20-year, 1 in 100-year and 1 in 1000-year recurrence intervals), with both surface water and fluvial flood conditions considered. Flood restrictions were processed based on previous hydrodynamic inundation modelling undertaken and inputted into a Network Analysis framework as restrictions for surface water and fluvial flood events. Surface water flooding was shown to cause more disruption to emergency responders operating within the city due to its widespread and spatially distributed footprint when compared to fluvial flood events of comparable magnitude. Fire and rescue 10 min accessibility was shown to decrease from 100, 66.5, 39.8 and 26.2 % under the no-flood, 1 in 20-year, 1 in 100-year and 1 in 1000-year surface water flood scenarios respectively. Furthermore, total inaccessibility was shown to increase with flood magnitude from 6.0 % under the 1 in 20-year scenario to 31.0 % under the 1 in 100-year flood scenario. Additionally, the evolution of emergency service accessibility throughout a surface water flood event is outlined, demonstrating the rapid impact on emergency service accessibility within the first 15 min of the surface water flood event, with a reduction in service coverage and overlap being observed for the ambulance service during a 1 in 100-year flood event. The study provides evidence to guide strategic planning for decision makers prior to and during emergency response to flood events at the city scale. It also provides a readily transferable method for exploring the impacts of natural hazards or disruptions in other cities or regions based on historic, scenario-based events or real-time forecasting, if such data are available.

History

School

  • Social Sciences and Humanities

Department

  • Geography and Environment

Published in

Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences

Volume

17

Issue

1

Pages

1 - 16

Citation

GREEN, D. ... et al., 2017. City-scale accessibility of emergency responders operating during flood events. Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences, 17 (1), pp.1-16

Publisher

Copernicus Publications on behalf of European Geosciences Union (EGU) / © Authors 2017

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Acceptance date

2016-11-28

Publication date

2017-01-03

Notes

This work is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

ISSN

1561-8633

eISSN

1684-9981

Language

  • en