My research assistant needs to clean these up a little bit, but they are very interesting, even as they are.
Tag: resilience
New manuscript on evacuation among nondrivers
Relocation of Children, Elderly, and Transit Dependents for a Daytime No-notice Evacuation in a Multimodal Transportation System
By Sirui Lui, Pamela Murray-Tuite, and Lisa Schweitzer
Under no-notice conditions with family members collecting dependents, the geographic location of these pickup points become a crucial factor to efficient evacuation. This paper presents a bi-level linear integer optimization model for facilities to relocate, optimally, dependents that need to be picked up. The program, solved using Lingo, is iterated with a traffic simulation model to obtain an optimal set of locations based on anticipated travel times with dependents relocated to those sites. Theentire methodology is applied to a sample application based on Chicago Heights, Illinois with three safety thresholds. The results found that the safe evacuation time threshold is quite important on implementing the strategy. When the safeevacuation threshold is tight, the relocation strategy is not effective;however, when it is adequate, relocating dependents of facilities increases the number of successful evacuation and decreases the total network evacuation time, and also significantly benefit those who rely on public transit to evacuate. Application of the proposed methodology to a certain area can assislocal decision-makers to take effective measures during no-notice evacuation and the relocation sites could be part of local evacuation management plans.
Language ability and evacuation destinations
From my research in Chicago, the data show a very clear relationship between English language proficiency and knowledge of potentially ‘safe’ locations to go to during an emergency. Those with little to no English skills were much more likely to be unable, even in interviews conducted in their native Spanish, to be able to identify a geographic location to go outside of the City of Chicago in case of a large-scale evacuation.
For those of you who are wondering, this is a mosaic plot, made in R.
How terrorists think according to TSA
So apparently, the lesson learned from this last round of terrorist plots is to not let people stand up or use their stuff during the last hour of a flight.
I can see it now.
Fade in, first class cabin of an airplane containing the disaffected and yet highly privileged son of Muslim corporate parents listing over and over in his head the many injustices that he will right by killing people he doesn’t know. Having so enumerated his many reasons, he fails to notice that it’s an hour before landing and he must now stay seated.
Young Terrorist, talking to himself: Well, I WAS going to set off an explosive that I illegally brought on board despite the rules and cause an enormous amount of human suffering, but damn I can’t now because I’m not supposed to get up!!! If only I had set my Bulova alarm so that I could have stood up 62 minutes from the end of the flight, vengeance would have been mine!! Just you wait until next time, infidels! Where’s my headphones so I can watch the last of Friends before I disembark?
In all seriousness, I am assuming that TSA is attempting to keep planes from acting as weapons in US airspace–the last hour on most international flights are spent heading into US cities. I get it. I can understand that, but…this does not negate the enormous gap in security that led us to where a terrorist was on a plane with explosives in his pants. I can’t even bring lip gloss.
Disaster and social justice philanthropy
It’s way too hot for me to do any of my own thinking today (are you noticing a trend of me not thinking? Don’t tell anybody.) Instead, HT to Angela Eikenberry this morning for tweeting this very interesting blog post on disaster grants-making.