Earthquakes : modeling people’s behavior for better protection

Simulation is an essential tool for improving people’s preparedness for disasters such as earthquakes, whose sudden and violent nature requires an effective emergency response. It can even be used by public authorities and crisis managers to implement the actions required to protect populations. With this in mind, a multi-disciplinary team of researchers, including two scientists from the ISTerre laboratory, has created an original computer model for the city of Beirut in Lebanon, which is particularly exposed and vulnerable to seismic risk.

While the majority of earthquake simulations in urban areas focus on damage to buildings, they have added the social consequences of such events to their model. Called PEERS, for Pedestrian Evacuation in Earthquake Risk Simulations, it takes into account the physical environment and human reactions in all their complexity, in order to simulate the evacuation and mobility of pedestrians immediately after an earthquake. As individual and inter-individual behaviours are highly dependent on social contexts and local physical constraints, the scientists used the catastrophic explosion in the port of Beirut on August 4, 2020 to gather information on the Lebanese population’s responses to a sudden disaster. This original method represents a further milestone on the road to achieving target 11.5 of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.

References

Rouba Iskandar, Julie Dugdale, Elise Beck, Cécile Cornou (2023) Agent-based simulation of seismic crisis including human behavior : application to the city of Beirut, Lebanon, Simulation : Transactions of the Society for Modeling and Simulation International

Article written by Louise Hurel - IRD