Measuring the Priorities for the Effective Evacuation from Mega-Disaster: Disaster Response Evacuation and Applications of the Analytic Hierarchy Process

Measuring the Priorities for the Effective Evacuation from Mega-Disaster: Disaster Response Evacuation and Applications of the Analytic Hierarchy Process

The purpose of this paper is to identify the suitable variables and to measure relative importance and priorities among the variables for influencing the effective evacuation in disaster response. There are some factors, such as social capital, crisis communication, responsiveness to make evacuation more efficiently and following the evacuation directions from the authorities. We use the AHP to measure the relative importance among the variables for giving the residents good decision making under the emergency situations. In this paper, first, social capital means the trust between government and residents, and among residents, openness of information about disasters for managing disasters effectively. Second, crisis communication has been defined as actions that share the crisis-related information among the residents participated in the evacuation process during the time of disaster. Third, responsiveness is a sensitive state of government’s responding to the residents’ demand when disaster strikes. In this first stage analysis, the order of relative importance was revealed as follows; social capital → responsiveness → crisis communication. Such results show that social capital for evacuating residents in the disaster-stricken area is more important than responsiveness and crisis communication. For attaining the objective of effective evacuation, it is necessary that securing the social capital is the most important in the context of primary factors. Especially, based on the analysis of whole indices, the priorities are as follows; mutual cooperation → reliability of policy → openness of information → diffusion of information → residents’ familiarity of evacuation → credibility to mass media → convenience on evacuation site → accessibility to mass media → appropriacy of evacuation → accuracy of information → response consistency of government → autonomy in communication.