Project Description
Severe flooding events represent significant social and economic losses to coastal communities. Climate change has the potential to exacerbate these impacts. Local government authorities such as the Moreton Bay Regional Council (MBRC) have undertaken hydrological investigations and prepared disaster dashboards and management plans to ensure community readiness.
In particular, evacuation centres and places of refuge must be able to meet community demands when they are needed. Here, we address two potential issues relating to evacuation centres and places of refuge managed by the MBRC:
(1) Is the current network of evacuation centres and places of refuge adequate for providing shelter to flood-prone suburbs?
(2) What additional information can be shared with the community to better inform accessibility at these evacuation centres and places of refuge to close the gap?
Data Story
[VISIT THE HOMEPAGE URL FOR FULL DESCRIPTION, DATA STORY AND IMAGES USED]
To address the first question, we mapped.
(1) the location of the evacuation centres/places of refuge; and
(2) overlaid it with the modelled extent of flooding.
This determined areas and suburbs that might be prone to flooding but do not have a local evacuation centre. For example, the Council might be interested in investigating whether an evacuation centre is required in the northern region of Moreton Bay, where residential dwellings are near Glass Mountain Creek and Elimbah Creek.
While not shown in this prototype, additional dataset can also be used to identify and more importantly, prioritise areas of concern, including:
(3) topographic and slope data;
(4) road network data (to assess whether routes to evacuation centres might be blocked during flood events);
(5) population density and demographic data from the ABS (i.e., for areas with higher numbers of people with disability or requiring assistance during emergencies); and
(6) flood modelling data, re-run using future climate projections (i.e., up to 2100), which the Council might be required by state planning policies to consider.
Cost connectivity and proximity analysis can be used in ArcMap to undertake these analyses.
To address the second question, we suggested improvements to the Moreton Bay Disaster Dashboard to improve community readiness for flood emergencies by:
(7) using the Moreton Bay Regional Council’s website to obtain data on evacuation centres, including information on venue capacity and accessibility equipment (i.e., for people with mobility issues)[ https://www.moretonbay.qld.gov.au/Services/Sport-Recreation/Halls]; and
(8) using the Telstra payphone finder to identify free payphones near these evacuation centres [https://www.telstra.com.au/find-us?search=payphone].