TY - JOUR
T1 - Disruption of emergency response to vulnerable populations during floods
AU - Yu, Dapeng
AU - Yin, Jie
AU - Wilby, Robert L.
AU - Lane, Stuart N.
AU - Aerts, Jeroen C.J.H.
AU - Lin, Ning
AU - Liu, Min
AU - Yuan, Hongyong
AU - Chen, Jianguo
AU - Prudhomme, Christel
AU - Guan, Mingfu
AU - Baruch, Avinoam
AU - Johnson, Charlie W.D.
AU - Tang, Xi
AU - Yu, Lizhong
AU - Xu, Shiyuan
N1 - Funding Information:
The work was supported by the Natural Environment Research Council of the UK (grant numbers NE/R009600/1, NE/N013050/1 and NE/S017186/1); by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (grant number 2017YFE0100700); by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant number 41871164); and by the National Science Foundation of the United States (grant number EAR-1520683). We thank M. Oppenheimer from Princeton University for his early contribution to the methodological development of this work.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited.
PY - 2020/9/1
Y1 - 2020/9/1
N2 - Emergency responders must reach urgent cases within mandatory timeframes, regardless of weather conditions. However, flooding of transport networks can add critical minutes to travel times between dispatch and arrival. Here, we explicitly model the spatial coverage of all Ambulance Service and Fire and Rescue Service stations in England during flooding of varying severity under compliant response times. We show that even low-magnitude floods can lead to a reduction in national-level compliance with mandatory response times and this reduction can be even more dramatic in some urban agglomerations, making the effectiveness of the emergency response particularly sensitive to the expected impacts of future increases in extreme rainfall and flood risk. Underpinning this sensitivity are policies leading to the centralization of the Ambulance Service and the decentralization of the Fire and Rescue Service. The results provide opportunities to identify hotspots of vulnerability (such as care homes, sheltered accommodation, nurseries and schools) for optimizing the distribution of response stations and developing contingency plans for stranded sites.
AB - Emergency responders must reach urgent cases within mandatory timeframes, regardless of weather conditions. However, flooding of transport networks can add critical minutes to travel times between dispatch and arrival. Here, we explicitly model the spatial coverage of all Ambulance Service and Fire and Rescue Service stations in England during flooding of varying severity under compliant response times. We show that even low-magnitude floods can lead to a reduction in national-level compliance with mandatory response times and this reduction can be even more dramatic in some urban agglomerations, making the effectiveness of the emergency response particularly sensitive to the expected impacts of future increases in extreme rainfall and flood risk. Underpinning this sensitivity are policies leading to the centralization of the Ambulance Service and the decentralization of the Fire and Rescue Service. The results provide opportunities to identify hotspots of vulnerability (such as care homes, sheltered accommodation, nurseries and schools) for optimizing the distribution of response stations and developing contingency plans for stranded sites.
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U2 - 10.1038/s41893-020-0516-7
DO - 10.1038/s41893-020-0516-7
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85085201560
SN - 2398-9629
VL - 3
SP - 728
EP - 736
JO - Nature Sustainability
JF - Nature Sustainability
IS - 9
ER -