Fire Safety Science Digital Archive

It is necessary to consider effective measures of evacuation in order to save city residents from post-earthquake fires. To accomplish this objective, we first need to know the nature of evacuation of city residents in urban conflagration. However, sufficient information on such evacuation behavior is hardly available. So we tried to figure out the evacuation behaviors of residents by comparing the observed data of a past urban fire with the results of the urban evacuation model. In the urban evacuation model, we estimate grand-level ambient temperature rise on city ground due to wind-blown fire flow and effect by radiation to which residents are exposed in the course of evacuation. Next, we simulated the evacuation of the residents assuming that they evacuate to avoid hazard of the fire and seek for a refuge. The network of evacuation route was constructed based on the city map at the time of the Hakodate Fire. We have compared simulated results of the number of victims and their locations with those of the fire record to validate the model.