Evacuation and Sheltering Assistance for Persons with Special Needs at Times of Disaster: Lessons Learned from Typhoon 23, Heavy Rainfall and Earthquake Disasters in the Year 2004

A series of heavy rainfall, typhoon and earthquake disasters caused a proportionately large number of deaths among the elderly in the year 2004 in Japan. In response to these tragedies, the national government set up committees to reduce damage within the disaster vulnerable population for the next three years. The discussions in the committee led to a new conceptualization that disaster vulnerability was caused by a lack of interaction between a person's special needs and the environment's capacity and resources to meet them. This person-in-environment model of hazard vulnerability was applied to those who resided in the Nankai-Tonankai tsunami hazard-prone area. 123 home care service users were interviewed in terms of their self-evacuation ability, degree of social isolation, and building weakness as well as tsunami exposure risks. Results were quantified and scores of person-in-environmentmodel hazard vulnerability were obtained. These scores were then used to visualize socially created vulnerability by means of weighted kernel density mapping of both persons with special needs (PSN's) and persons with special needs at times of disaster (PSND's).