Exploring the influence of flooding conditions on crowd evacuation: An experimental study

Abstract

Understanding the impact of dynamic water flow on crowd evacuation is essential for improving pedestrian safety under urban floods. Previous research has primarily focused on studying pedestrian movement characteristics in static water scenarios, whereas investigations of pedestrian evacuation under dynamic water flow are still rare. In this study, a series of bottleneck evacuation experiments were performed using a novel experimental flooding setup. Five inflow depths, i.e., 0, 0.3, 0.4, 0.5, and 0.6 m, corresponding to five water flow rates, i.e., 0, 0.225, 0.3, 0.375, and 0.45 m³/s, were designed to simulate dynamic water flow in bottleneck layouts. Two evacuation strategies, including individual evacuation and cooperative evacuation, were considered. How inflow depths and evacuation strategies affect density, speed, and nearest-neighbor distribution at the bottleneck is explored. Our findings demonstrate that the pedestrian speed and flow rate in cooperative scenarios are higher than those in individual scenarios. Total evacuation times are 21.7 %, 10.77 %, 5 %, and 14.85 % faster in cooperative scenarios than those in individual scenarios at inflow depths of 0.3, 0.4, 0.5, and 0.6 m. These results will offer valuable insights for calibrating flood evacuation models and improving crowd management during emergencies.