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Emergency planning focus of UB research
Daniel Hess says Buffalo and other upstate cities face some of the same evacuation problems in the event of a natural or man-made disaster as New Orleans did during Hurricane Katrina.
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“This is a potentially very dangerous situation because the percentage of households without vehicles in upstate New York cities meets or exceeds the percentage of such homes in New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina struck.”
If a natural or man-made disaster forced the evacuation of Buffalo, officials would be confronted with a challenging problem: Nearly one-third of its households are without cars.
And Buffalo, with 31 percent of its households without vehicles, is not alone in terms of upstate cities in that predicament. Twenty-eight percent of Albany households have no vehicle access. The percentage in Syracuse is 27 and in Rochester, only two percentage points lower.
The numbers have emerged from the research of UB transportation and evacuation expert Daniel B. Hess. The “carless,” he says, include the poor, elderly and disabled.
“This is a potentially very dangerous situation,” he says, “because the percentage of households without vehicles in upstate New York cities meets or exceeds the percentage of such homes in New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina struck.”
Hess, associate professor of urban and regional planning in the School of Architecture and Planning, has studied the devastating aftermath from Hurricane Katrina. He recently returned from New Orleans, where he studied the emergency planning of acute-care hospitals during Hurricane Gustav to discover what was learned since Katrina.
After evaluating the written emergency plans of the four major upstate New York cities, as well as areas near nuclear plants, he concludes that “with the exception of sites near nuclear power plants, many upstate places have inadequate written plans for mass evacuation when it comes to this particular population.”
He and co-researcher Julie C. Gotham reported their findings in the Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management.
Hess, whose research is funded by MCEER, is among UB researchers working in the strategic strength Extreme Events: Mitigation and Reponses identified in the UB 2020 strategic-planning process.
Within that same strategic strength, Christina Tsai, associate professor of civil, structural and environmental engineering, is developing new mathematical and computer models that will better reflect the uncertainty of flow events, such as hurricane-induced flooding, to provide emergency planners with more precise data.
Her work, called uncertainty analysis, is geared toward creating more precise predictions of how such extreme flow events near lakes and rivers will impact urban areas.
“Our ultimate goal is to provide emergency managers with new scientific tools that can help them to better determine the level of risk for local communities posed by extreme flow events, such as hurricane-induced floods,” she says. “The new tools also will more precisely reflect how significant is the potential for specific levels of contamination and sedimentation in rivers and lakes.”
Tsai’s project is funded by a prestigious $407,921 Faculty Early Career Development Award from the National Science Foundation. The NSF’s CAREER program recognizes and supports the early career-development activities of teacher-scholars "who are most likely to become the academic leaders of the 21st century."
The grant also supports Tsai’s development of more quantitative courses in this area, as well as increased exposure for students to cross-disciplinary training in mathematical geosciences.
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