Lane County Dam Evacuation Analysis

project contact: Linda Cook, Lane County Emergency Manager

This analysis explores scenarios where the amount of advance warning and the speed of a flood are variable. We simulate traffic evacuation for approximately 10,000 vehicles in the area around Lookout and Fall Creek Dam in central Lane County just east of Springfield/Eugene, Oregon.

technical questions: stephen@simtable.com

• At the beginning of a simulation, we distribute the cars in 4 evacuation areas defined by a KML shape file. Each one of the colored evacuation areas has a goal evacuation point. eg:
  • green and red areas go to Pleasant Hill
  • blue area goes to Lane Community College
  • yellow area goes to Goshen
• The KML map is changeable to evaluate different evacuation plans
• Each road segment has the number of lanes and the actual speed limit
• Cars move at speed limit during evacuation. As the density of the traffic increases on a given road segment, the cars on the road segment decrease their speed.
• The Analysis feature explores the tradeoff of advance warning vs. speed of the flood. Advance warning can range from -3 hours to +3 hours for this particular interface. A -3 hour advance warning would be a scenario like an earthquake where there is no advanced warning and an immediate breach and it takes a few hours to mobilize reverse 911 and public broadcast notification.
• The analysis tool is a 2-D graph that plots from the green to red the proportion of the evacuees that make it out in time. If a vehicle makes it out, we color that vehicle's originating house green. If the vehicle is overtaken at anytime by the flood, we color that vehicles originating house red.
• In the example scenario screenshot above, The circular gray dot indicates that the advanced notices is approx 1 hour 45 minutes and the flood is moving at ~22mph. The area of the graph is between green and red as 64% of the evacuees make it out in time. The houses that didn't make it out in time are colored red. In this scenario, residents in these areas might be best served with shelter-in-place instructions or plans to evacuate to local high ground instead of trying to make it out of the valley in their cars.
• The map interface allows the user to change the base layers using the blue "+" key on the right side of the view
• The simulation currently runs in a browser and is designed to also run on one of the 4 Simtables in service throughout Oregon