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AbstractThere is little guidance to assist healthcare facility planners to make a shelter‐in‐place versus evacuation decision in response to a hurricane and associated flooding emergencies or wildfires. In such advance notice events, planning steps may be taken that factor in the calculated risk and predictability of the event, allowing planners greater opportunity to implement a systematic response. The authors completed a review of literature and determined that there is only guidance for actions after a decision has been made, but little to help facility administrators weigh their options. The authors conducted a series of structured interviews with community and hospital planners who have dealt with the decision to evacuate or shelter‐in‐place in the face of real events. Insights derived from these real‐event experiences are summarized, and proposed next steps for further research are outlined.

Abstract. In an emergency situation shelter space is crucial for people affected by natural hazards. Emergency planners in disaster relief and mass care can greatly benefit from a sound methodology that identifies suitable shelter areas and sites where shelter services need to be improved. A methodology to rank suitability of open spaces for contingency planning and placement of shelter in the immediate aftermath of a disaster is introduced. The Open Space Suitability Index uses the combination of two different measures: a qualitative evaluation criterion for the suitability and manageability of open spaces to be used as shelter sites and another quantitative criterion using a capacitated accessibility analysis based on network analysis. For the qualitative assessment implementation issues, environmental considerations and basic utility supply are the main categories to rank candidate shelter sites. A geographic information system is used to reveal spatial patterns of shelter demand. Advantages and limitations of this method are discussed on the basis of an earthquake hazard case study in the Kathmandu Metropolitan City. According to the results, out of 410 open spaces under investigation, 12.2% have to be considered not suitable (Category D and E) while 10.7% are Category A and 17.6% are Category B. Almost two-thirds (59.55%) are fairly suitable (Category C).

Timely responses to emergencies are critical for urban disaster and emergency management, particularly in densely populated mega-cities. Researchers and personnel involved in urban emergency management nowadays rely on computers to carry out complex evacuation planning. Agent-based modeling, which supports the representation of interactions among individuals and between individuals and their environments, has become a major approach to simulating evacuations wherein spatial–temporal dynamics and individual conditions need attention, such as congestion in urban areas. However, the development of optimal evacuation plans based upon agent-based evacuation simulations can be very time-consuming. In this study, to shorten the computation time to provide a timely response in an efficient way, we develop a knowledge database to store evacuation plans for typical population distributions generated by mobile phone location data. Subsequently, we use the prepared knowledge database (offline) to accelerate real-time (online) processes in searching for near-optimal evacuation plans. Our experimental result demonstrates that the evacuation plans generated with a knowledge database always outperform those that are generated without a knowledge database. Specifically, the knowledge database can reduce the computation time by an average of 96.76%, with an average fitness value improvement of 21.86%. This result confirms the effectiveness of our proposed approach in improving agent-based evacuation planning. With the rapid development of human sensor data collection and analysis, the estimation of a more accurate population distribution will become easier in future. Thus, we believe that the proposed approach of developing a knowledge database based on population distribution patterns will provide a more feasible alternative solution for evacuation planning in the practice of urban emergency management.

ASYLUM CLAIMANTS PROCESSED IN CANADA Number of asylum claims processed in Ontario, Quebec, rest of Canada and the entire country, over the period of 2000 to 2017 Recently, the number of asylum-seekers – people applying for refugee status at the Canadian border (as opposed to individuals claiming refugee status from their country of origin) – has attracted a great deal of media attention. The focus has been on the recent unexpected influx of asylum-seekers crossing the border from the U.S. into Manitoba and Quebec. The federal government has made an assertion that Canada can handle the surge in newcomers. However, it is provincial or municipal governments, and in particular local social agencies, in a municipality in which the claim is being made, that are responsible for allocating the necessary resources to handle the surge in asylumseekers. This is important for understanding the potential impact it may have on the agencies' ability to provide those individuals with the required assistance and other support.

When the Conservative Member of Parliament and Leader of the House of Commons Jacob Rees-Mogg complained on London's LBC radio that the 72 victims of the 2017 Grenfell fire did not use common sense and simply leave the building, and that he could not understand how it had 'anything to do with race or class', he fell into a trap which is now at least 150 years old. This has seen the art and act of evacuating – especially tall buildings – blamed on the evacuees themselves. It is also revealing of an aesthetics of erasure which silences a classed, raced and gendered politics which has served to render certain subjects and bodies as not only victims, but culpable. The vertical evacuee has been considered too slow, too big, too indecisive, too passionate, too weak, too much, too many – too inadequate. In this paper, and in building on a wider politics of verticality and mobility, I pull on several threads of the gendered and raced geographies of high-rise vertical evacuation focusing particularly on the solidaristic movements and expressions of the workers. The paper explores the history of tall building evacuations, focusing on early high-rise factory fires, their investigation, and subsequent changes to fire regulation, building technologies and working practices in North America which affected predominantly young, female and migrant working labour.

How do people behave in the seconds after they become aware they have been caught up in a real-life transport emergency? This paper presents the first micro-behavioral, video-based analysis of the behavior of passengers during a small explosion and subsequent fire on a subway train. We analyzed the behavior of 40 passengers present in the same carriage as the explosion. We documented the first action of the passengers following the onset of the emergency and described evidence of pro- and anti-social behavior. Passengers' first actions varied widely. Moreover, anti-social behavior was rare and displays of pro-sociality were more common. In a quantitative analysis, we examined spatial clustering of running behavior and patterns in passenger exit choices. We found both homogeneity and heterogeneity in the running behavior and exiting choices of passengers. We discuss the implications of these findings for the mass emergency literature and for evacuation modeling.

This report examines the administrative history of the program, the evolution of its award process, and the issues that Congress may consider as the EFS program approaches its fourth decade. In particular, the report highlights recent program delays in funding and, in general, how the EFS program and its emphasis on emergency services fit into the context of the federal government's approach to addressing homelessness.