EMERGENCY SHELTER SITE SELECTION IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD LEVEL AND OPTIMAL GUIDANCE OF EARTHQUAKE AFFECTED PEOPLE TO THE CORRESPONDING SITE – CASE STUDY: CHIZAR NEIGHBORHOOD IN TEHRAN

Abstract

The Occurrence of severe earthquakes can create permanent adverse physical, social and economic effects, especially in large and populated cities, one of them is becoming homelessness of thousands to millions of people. The first and most important requirement of the earthquake-affected people is shelter. However, if the homeless survivors leave their neighborhood to get shelter, they will suffer from mental anxiety and possible loss of properties. Therefore, it is better if they can be settled in a safe place close to their homes, even if their houses are heavily damaged or even destroyed. This research has been undertaken with the aim of presenting a method for site selection of the emergency settlements for the earthquake-affected people in the neighborhood level. For this purpose, buildings in each neighborhood are classified in three main categories of disaster-preventive, disaster-creative, and neutral. The buildings in each category can be graded using some appropriate criteria, depending on the extent of disaster they can create, or the amount of the prevention they can provide. On this basis, the safer areas in the neighborhood which should be far from the more disaster-creative buildings and facilities, and close to the disaster-preventive buildings, can be identified, and among those areas the one which have better accessibility by the residents of the neighborhood can be selected as the emergency shelter sites. This paper describes the criteria for the aforementioned grading, and the method of guiding people to the shelters in the aftermath of an earthquake. For the analysis, a GIS-based software has been used to combine the layers of the required information for decision making. The proposed method has been applied to the Chizar neighborhood in district 1 of the capital city of Tehran, and the findings and outcomes have been presented as a sample. © 2024, International Association for Earthquake Engineering. All rights reserved.