Understanding evacuation behaviour and associated dynamics of an earthquake response provides valuable information to consider for future disaster risk management and response planning. Whilst the majority of evacuation behaviour literature focus on a specific phase during the evacuation response such as tsunami preparedness, risk awareness, or evacuation intentions, limited survey research has captured a comprehensive overview of a complete evacuation process of real earth-quake-tsunami events. This research addresses this gap by analysing the evacuation response of Kaikōura residents following the 2016 Kaikōura earthquake and subsequent tsunami, with the intention to inform realistic rules and interaction inputs for evacuation modelling.
A questionnaire survey was developed to better understand risk awareness influence on warning and evacuation decision-making processes and origin-route-destination location response. The survey results of 131 Kaikōura residents showed that the majority of respondents had a ‘good’ or ‘very good’ level of knowledge on tsunami hazard and the need to evacuate prior to the Kaikōura earthquake, which resulted in a high proportion of respondents evacuating because of a potential tsunami. Furthermore, many respondents attributed their high level of awareness to Civil Defence information which reflects the extensive emergency management public education and awareness campaigns on disaster risk in Kaikōura over the last ten years. Geospatial information of origin-route-destination locations revealed common safe zone locations along Kaikōura peninsula, prevalent evacuation routes and congestion barriers experienced during the 2016 event. This information informed key parameters for the development of a network-based vehicular evacuation model to estimate evacuation time for individual households and Kaikōura’s road network. The results of this research provides new and insightful information for local, regional and national level emergency response planning and enhance disaster resilience in New Zealand.