Available Flood Evacuation Time for High-Risk Areas in the Middle Reach of Chao Phraya River Basin

Abstract

Information about risk is essential to design flood risk management programs. To our knowledge, this is the first attempt to develop an emergency flood evacuation plan based on flood risk assessment. Flood risk assessment in the middle Chao Phraya River Basin (CPRB) was simultaneously analyzed and mapped as the product of flood hazard, and social vulnerability maps generated by fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and fuzzy logic. One of the purposes of flood risk mapping is to promote proper and prompt evacuation actions for residents. The emergency flood evacuation model was tested to explore the available time of evacuation, to reduce the risk or even the loss of life. The simulation results showed that significant time was available for evacuation in the middle CPRB. This was calculated based on a physical status of evacuees, safe evacuation condition, shortest evacuation path, flood shelter, and road capacity.