Abstract
Based on the earlier study result that the gathering of damage information can be quickly achieved in a municipality with a smaller population, it is proposed that damage information is gathered and analyzed using an area roughly equivalent to a primary school district as a basic unit. The introduction of this type of decentralized system is expected to quickly gather important information on each area. The information gathered by these communal disaster prevention bases is sent to the disaster prevention headquarters which in turn feeds back more extensive information over a wider area to the communal disaster prevention bases.
Concrete systems have been developed according to the above mentioned framework, and we performed large-scale experiments on simulating disaster information collection, transmission and on utilization for smooth responses against earthquake disaster with collaboration from Toyohashi City, Aichi Prefecture, where is considered to suffer extensive damage from the Tokai and Tonankai Earthquakes with very high probability of the occurrence.
Using disaster information collection/transmission equipments composed of long-distance wireless LAN, a notebook computer, a Web camera and an IP telephone, city staffs could easily input and transmit the information such as fire, collapsed houses and impassable roads, which were collected by the inhabitants participated in the experiment. Headquarters could confirm such information on the map automatically plotted, and also state of each disaster-prevention facility by means of Web-cameras and IP telephones.
Based on the damage information, fire-spreading, evaluation, and traffic simulations were automatically executed at the disaster countermeasure office and their results were displayed on the large screen to utilize for making decisions such as residents' evacuation. These simulated results were simultaneously displayed at each disaster-prevention facility and were served to make people understand the situation of whole damage of the city and necessity of evacuation with optimum timing and access.
According to the evaluation by the city staffs through the experiments, information technology is available for rationally implementing initial responses just after a large earthquake in spite of some improvement on the systems used in the experiments.
