Fire Safety Science Digital Archive

It is expected that there will be a large number of residents evacuating in an urban fire following a major earthquake. It is essential to implement effective evacuation safety measures for maintaining residents’ safety. We have been developing a model to estimate evacuation behaviors of city residents. The model has been applied to past urban fires such as the Hakodate City Fire in 1934 and the Sakata City Fire in 1976. The model is based on the potential theory. In this paper, the model was refined by incorporating the following sub-models: (1) a safety evaluation model which controls destination of evacuees by evaluating the safety of the evacuation route network; and (2) a stochastic route selection model of evacuees. In the new model, evacuees travel from a high potential point to a low potential point and select the route stochastically from candidate routes due to potential. Potential is what the danger potential and the safety potential are integrated. In this study, the evacuation behaviors of residents in the Kanto Earthquake Fire in 1923, a representative fire disaster in Japan, were simulated. The results were compared in terms of the number and location of fatalities, and the number of people evacuated to major refuges.