Disaster risk reduction education is provided through external support at schools. Most educational programs evaluate the level of knowledge transfer. However, the particular context of school is not considered, even though it prescribes the understanding of students. In this study, tsunami education was provided by a non-Mexican NGO at two schools in Acapulco, Mexico, and questionnaire surveys were conducted. The surveys identified that students were more interested in obtaining knowledge than learning action for their self-protection. This tendency in motivation was generated by the school context: the school teaches decontextualized knowledge despite the need to contextualize disaster education in daily life. This disparity caused a gap in the communication between the NGO members and the students. Therefore, it is important that disaster education programs remove students from the school context and place them in the context of daily life. More localized content could help remove students from the context of school. This study argues that the effectiveness of disaster education is influenced by the context in which students learn, and the findings suggest that educational practices should be designed on the basis of the context of the learners.

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We propose a revised inundation flow model for urban areas in which storage effects of ditches are incorporated into stormwater drainage and overflow processes. Ditches are assumed to be on both sides of every street. Simulations were performed for two cases, i.e., considering and not considering ditches, and a significant difference was observed between the results for the two cases. However, the simulation results obtained by including the volume capacity of ditches in the volume of stormwater drainage boxes in the authors’ conventional model are almost the same as the results obtained using our revised model. Consequently, while the volume of ditches has a significant effect on the inundation results, the stormwater drainage process can be simplified in the simulation model.

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On-site storage facilities are an effective countermeasure for mitigating the damage caused by pluvial inundations in urban areas. In this study, we slightly modified our previously-developed integrated simulation model for pluvial inundation, and applied it to an actual urban area. We quantitatively evaluated the mitigation effects of assumed on-site storage facilities, and found that as a single strategy, on-site storage facilities with a practical scale of storage capacity could not provide sufficient mitigation. We recommend installing both on-site and off-site storage facilities widely distributed in a catchment area.

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