CBRN Events and Mass Evacuation Planning

Some natural or man-made disasters can oblige authorities to evacuate masses. Among such events, CBRN accidents are the most susceptible of obliging the sudden movement of people, but drawing an emergency plan related to mass evacuation is a complex matter, far more difficult than emergency plans normally needed even in the largest buildings. Alerting every person in a community and planning their movement to ensure they arrive safely and on time to the designated destination need both broader and more specific skills than preparing ordinary emergency plans. The most critical areas in such a discipline are the capacity of (1) calculating the time needed to alert using multimedia communication tools and (2) assessing the time history of the evacuation. Both the communication and the simulation issues are currently studied and still need to be improved. Nonetheless, tools already exist that, similarly to the performance-based approach used in buildings safety, allow one to estimate the time needed to inform and evacuate masses. In this manner, it is possible to engineer an approach to large-scale evacuation that follows the same path adopted by fire protection standards. The paper will analyze some aspects of the Fukushima event in 2011 that allow an understanding of the need for a better ability to manage mass evacuation through the use of specific simulation models and their integration with the emergency plans.