Abstract
Several approaches to reduce the social damages due to water suspension in disasters are classified roughly into the approaches of “demand side” and “supply side”. This study focused on the approaches of “demand side”. The approaches of “demand side” are a management to stabilize the water supply-demand balance by demand adjustment that corresponded with the water supply capacity degradation at the time of a disaster. In particular, this paper proposed a method of “Water Demand Management for Disaster Preparedness (WDMD)” through “risk communications”. First, the authors have become clear the structure of “water demand in disasters (WDD)”, which depends on the “water suspension tolerable limits (WTL)”. Next, to increase the WTL, namely, to manage the WDD, a psychological model to prompt the awareness, the understanding and the solutions of water suspension risk through communications by water supply utilities was constructed. Last, to verify the validity of the model, the authors conducted several communication experiments on 600 urban residents, and this experiments also indicated that the rate of increase of WTL changes due to the difference in communication methods and information contents. Furthermore, the success of the risk communications was indicated the possibility of being effective for fostering awareness of “mutual-help” (to share own tap water with residents in water suspension areas).
