Abstract
Increasing urban pluvial flood disasters due to climate change and rapid urbanisation have been a great challenge worldwide. Timely and effective emergency evacuation is important for reducing casualties and losses. This has become a bottleneck for emergency management. This study aimed to develop a commonly used Agent-Based Mode (ABM) for pluvial flood emergency evacuation at the city scale, exploring the cascading impacts of pluvial flooding on human behaviour and emergency evacuation. The July 2021 pluvial flood event in Zhengzhou, Henan Province, claiming 380 lives and 40.9 billion yuan in direct losses, was selected as this case study. A raster-based hydraulic model (ECNU Flood-Urban) was used to predict flood inundation (extent and depth) during an event in Zhengzhou’s centre. Moreover, a comparative analysis of emergency evacuations was conducted before and after the pluvial flood event. The results showed that crowd behaviour plays an important role in an emergency evacuation, and extensive flooding leads to an 11–83% reduction in the number of evacuees. This study highlights the importance of risk education and contingency plans in emergency response. The ABM model developed in this study is proven to be effective and practical and will provide support for decision-making in urban flood emergency management.
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Acknowledgements
We appreciate the detailed suggestions and comments from the responsible editor and anonymous reviewers. This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 41871164), the National Key Research and Development Program of China (Grant No. 2018YFC1508803), the Major Program of National Social Science Fund of China (Grant No. 18ZDA105), the Shanghai Philosophy and Social Science Planning Program (Grant No. 2021XRM005) and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Grant No. 2022ECNU-XWK-XK001).
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Yang, Y., Yin, J., Wang, D. et al. ABM-based emergency evacuation modelling during urban pluvial floods: A “7.20” pluvial flood event study in Zhengzhou, Henan Province. Sci. China Earth Sci. 66, 282–291 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11430-022-1015-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11430-022-1015-6