2023 Volume 21 Issue 2 Pages 97-107
Since the Great East Japan Earthquake on March 11, 2011, education on how to prepare for disasters has been promoted on a daily basis. One of the most important of these is the understanding of evacuation routes. Evacuation routes may be pre-designated by the municipality or set by voluntary disaster prevention organizations or residents, but the validity of such routes is not ensured. Therefore, it is necessary to develop a method to evaluate the adequacy of the established evacuation routes. Therefore, we conducted an experiment in which 17 residents of Nishio city, Aichi Prefecture, evacuated on foot using a tsunami evacuation drill simulator that we had developed, following a route that each resident was familiar with. During the evacuation, the participants were asked to speak about what they noticed along the evacuation route and to measure their gaze during the experiment. The results suggest a tendency to evacuate while identifying prominent buildings in the distance as landmarks, and a subconscious awareness of the need to go in the direction of wide streets during evacuation. In addition to this, it was suggested that it is possible to grasp the tendency during searching the evacuation route and evaluate the validity of landmark placement by extracting points on the evacuation route where it is difficult to grasp the location and discussing the results and reasons for following a route that differs from the actual evacuation route. This suggests that the simulator for tsunami evacuation drills can be used to establish a basis for discussions on the formulation of evacuation routes and the identification of problems, and may contribute to disaster prevention and mitigation policies and studies.
