NAVAL POSTGRADUATE SCHOOL
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CENTER FOR INFRASTRUCTURE DEFENSE
Escape from the Delta: Preparation and Evacuation for Catastrophic Flooding in CAL EMA Region IV M.S. Thesis in Operations Research (completion date: March 2011) LT Timothy C. Yuhas, USN tcyuhas@nps.edu last update: October 2010 Background: California Emergency Management Agency (CALEMA) Region IV consists of eleven counties in the north central valley of central California. This region consists of numerous terrain types from deltas, increasing in elevation to mountains. The Region begins in Yolo County east of the Bay Area and extends to the Nevada state line. The major population centers are in Yolo, Placer, Sacramento, San Joaquin and Stanislaus Counties (Figure 1a), and all happen to lie within a major flood plain (Figure 1b). The Sacramento‐San Joaquin River Delta (Delta) covers an area of more than 700,000 acres and consists of over 700 miles of waterways and approximately 1,100 miles of levees.1 Historically, these levees have been subject to failure from heavy rains, seasonal snowpack melt, and earthquakes. (a) (b) (c) Figure 1. CALEMA Region IV is prone to flooding. (a) The four counties in this region house a population of approximately 2.8 million. (b) Flooding in the Delta region has the potential to affect people in multiple counties. (c) Historically, the levees that protect the Delta have suffered failures. The risk of catastrophic flood to the Delta region is widely recognized by State and Federal government officials, who have focused the 2011 Golden Guardian statewide emergency planning and response exercise on this scenario. It is well understood that a major flooding event will affect several counties. Individual counties have their own evacuation plans, however these plans typically are minimally coordinated with neighboring counties. In Sacramento, the largest population center in the region, the challenge is further complicated due to the constrained ability for evacuees to depart the county with only six major highway arteries out of the city, many of which are potentially lost during mild flooding. 1
CALFED Bay Delta Program, “Levee System Integrity Program Plan: Final Programmatic EIS/EIR Technical Appendix,” July 2000. Available electronically from http://www.water.ca.gov/floodmgmt/dsmo/sab/drmsp/docs/CALFED_ROD_Levee_Plan.pdf. Accessed October 20, 2010. NAVAL POSTGRADUATE SCHOOL
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CENTER FOR INFRASTRUCTURE DEFENSE
Thesis Scope: This thesis will develop a spatial evacuation model and a space‐time evacuation model with major road networks in Region IV and will use population data by zip code from the US Census for the populations in Yolo, Placer, Sacramento, San Joaquin and Stanislaus counties. The model will provide the optimal evacuation routes to evacuate an affected population in an emergency. The network will consist of major inter and intrastate highways, as well as county highways. The objective of this thesis is to provide analysis in support of coordinated evacuation planning and preparedness. Specifically, we address the following questions:  Given the location of at‐risk populations and Evacuation Points (EPs), what is the minimum evacuation time?  Where does the affected population go?  What routes do they follow?  What is the benefit, if any, of setting up contra flow?  How does the evacuation change over time as the flooding gets worse?  Where are the most vulnerable parts of the network, and how does their loss impact evacuation times?  What could be done to mitigate those vulnerabilities? This research is being conducted in partnership with CALEMA Region IV Director Jim Brown. Project Time Line: Oct 2010‐Jan 2011 Model refinement and analysis. Feb 2011 Presentation of final FOUO report to stakeholders. Mar 2011 Thesis completion and graduation. For more information contact:  LT Timothy Yuhas, USN, tcyuhas@nps.edu, NPS Operations Research Student  Dr. David Alderson, Director, Center for Infrastructure Defense, dlalders@nps.edu
About the NPS Center for Infrastructure Defense (CID): The mission of the CID is to develop, review and promote science of the highest quality in the service of defending critical infrastructure systems affecting our homeland at the national, state, and local levels. About the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS): NPS is a fully accredited technical university with a highly motivated student body consisting of military officers and government employees from the U.S. and allied countries. The Operations Research Department offers MS and PhD degrees and is one of the largest in the country with its 150 students, 25 tenure‐track faculty, and 19 full‐time adjunct faculty, including three members of the National Academy of Engineering, three INFORMS Fellows, and three Koopman Prize winners. NPS is located on the Pacific coast in Monterey, California, about 120 miles south of San Francisco.