Tsunami Evacuation

Applications in GIS - Mod 3

In March of 2011 the Great East Japan Earthquake occurred off the Pacific coast of the northeastern part of Japan causing devastating damage and extremely destructive tsunami waves, which caused even more damage.  This damage included the disabling of the reactor cooling systems of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, one of the largest nuclear power stations in the world, which lead to nuclear radiation leaks.  This week's assignment was to map the radiation evacuation zones surrounding the Fukushima-Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, analyze the tsunami runup on the Fukushima coast for three zones, and determine the at-risk population locations within each of those zones.

We started the assignment by creating a geodatabase and datasets to store the data we'd be using and creating for the assignment.  Next we

isolated the Fukushima II Power Plant for analysis to determine radiation evacuation zones using the Multiple Ring Buffer and Clip tools, then adjusted the symbology to create the different zones.  With the evacuation zones in place we ran queries to isolate the impacted cities and determine the population affected.

Our last portion was to determine the evacuation zones for the tsunami runup, estimate at-risk cities within each, and identify roads and nuclear power plants that would be inundated.  Again we created a buffer of 10,000 meters of coastline to work from. The rest was accomplished through a model, automating the Con, Raster to Polygon, Append and Intersect tools to create the tsunami runup evacuation zones and clip out the roads, power plants and cities that fell within those zones.