Evacuation Plans for Naval Station Newport and Aquidneck Island Under Uncertainty
Abstract
Aquidneck Island, RI, is vulnerable to hurricanes; hence, evacuation plans are critical to the welfare of on-island military installations and communities. Coordination among communities is important as there are few on-island shelters and evacuation will require military and civilian evacuees to egress across the same bridges. Previous work studied optimal vehicle routing to minimize clearance times and coordinate evacuation. However, past work does not consider uncertainty involved in go (evacuate)/no-go(shelter-in-place) decisions. Under hurricane conditions, high winds will force bridge closures and calling an evacuation too late forces populations to shelter-in-place. In contrast, calling an evacuation too early for threatening, non-striking storms might direct evacuees off-island toward danger. We develop a model that can consider these tensions by combining synthetic forecasts for past storms, stochastic hurricane trajectory, expected evacuation demands, and optimal routing. We apply our model to two historical storms: Hurricane Bob in 1991 and Hurricane Gloria in 1985. Results show our model performs well for striking storms by evacuating the majority of vulnerable communities. However, our model also leads to large evacuations for threatening, non-striking storms. We conclude our model forms a good basis for evacuation planning yet needs additional analysis prior to use.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Sep 01, 2022
- Accession Number
- AD1200452
Entities
People
- Christina K. Domanowski
Organizations
- Naval Postgraduate School