Proposed evacuation tunnels for wide-area disaster

The present paper proposes a safe evacuation method using underground evacuation tunnels for urban area evacuation owing to a wide-area fire disaster that may occur in the aftermath of a major earthquake. To survey the effectiveness of the evacuation tunnels, evacuation completion time was estimated using wide-area evacuation simulations. It was discovered that evacuation completion time for underground tunnels was one hour faster than that of evacuation above ground (even with the widening of the surface roads) if tunnel usage was appropriately controlled so that vulnerable people (i.e., elderly people and children) used it while others evacuated above ground. Moreover, an estimation of the construction cost of evacuation tunnels in a metropolitan area indicated that one could be built at the same, or even lower, cost than that of the road widening above ground. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.