An Italian project for exposure reduction in an urban area: experimentation design and DSS development

Risk can be defined as a cardinal measure of potential economic loss, human injury or environmental damage in terms of both incident probability and the magnitude of the loss, injury or damage. Risk depends on: probability that an emergency event occurs; vulnerability of the system; exposure of the system. Exposure can be defined as the equivalent homogeneous weighted value of people, goods and infrastructures affected during and after the event. In this work we will present the first results relative to the project SICURO (Risk reduction through evacuation procedures: guidelines, experimentation and Decision Support Systems) developed to reduce the risk in terms of exposure in an urban area. The aims of this project are: to provide public administration with guidelines for planning and managing an urban system in emergency conditions; to test models and procedures to assess the effects of action to reduce risk in terms of exposure; to construct a Decision Support System for public administration where models and procedures are implemented. In this paper we will present: the project structure; the test structure; some preliminary results obtained from experimentation. (a) The project structure has these components: state-of-the-art methodology to reduce exposure in an urban area for disastrous events; general formulation and definition of exposure; construction of models and procedures to evaluate exposure in emergency conditions; a test of exposure in the urban transportation system of Melito Porto Salvo in the province of Reggio Calabria (Italy); in this component, parameters of models constructed in component 3 will be calibrated; drafting of guidelines for evacuation planning; construction of a Decision Support System where models and procedures relative to component 3 will be implemented. (b) The aim of the experiment is to assess evacuation characteristics in an urban area after a disastrous event. People present in the area will be notified of the event and will be asked to reach a pre-established centre. Our experimentation requires that socioeconomic information be found (population, number employed, public buildings, schools, etc.), transport supply (infrastructures, etc.). Information can be found in official sources and specific surveys with manual/automatic tools or video cameras. From these surveys we can obtain variables relative to flows and costs for calibrating models used in the Decision Support System. (c) Preliminary results of this project will be presented in terms of evacuation times, in relation to different evacuation scenarios. For the covering abstract see ITRD E135582.