Modeling spatiotemporal patterns of building vulnerability and content evacuations before a riverine flood disaster

In this paper, a spatiotemporal framework is developed for identifying building vulnerabilities and content evacuations during riverine flooding events. This work investigates the spatiotemporal properties required to trigger building contents evacuations in the floodplain during a flood event. The spatial properties for building risks are based on topography, flood inundation, building location, building elevation, and road access to determine five categories of vulnerability, vulnerable basement, flooded basement, vulnerable first-floor, flooded first-floor, and road access. Using this framework, a model designed to track the spatiotemporal patterns of building evacuations is presented. The model is based upon real-time flood forecast predictions that are linked with building properties to create a model that captures the spatiotemporal ordering of building vulnerabilities and building content evacuations. Applicable to different communities at risk from flooding, the evacuation model is applied to a historical flood for a university campus, demonstrating how the defined elements are used to derive a pattern of vulnerability and evacuation for a campus threatened by severe flooding.