A GIS-Based System for Spatial-Temporal Availability Evaluation of the Open Spaces Used as Emergency Shelters: The Case of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear authors,

thank you for your very interesting and innovative article dealing with the GIS-Based Self-motivated Emergency Evacuation Location Selection and Evaluation System in Canada.

I greatly appreciated the revisions and improvements made in comparison with the previous version of the manuscript.

I added some small revisions inside the attached pdf.

Furthermore, I recommend substantial improvement especially from a stylistic and layout point of view, following the journal's type of paper as best as possible.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Dear Reviewer:

We have revised and updated the manuscript based on your suggestions and comments.

Attached is the replies to all comments.

 

Yours sincerely,

Yuanzhi Zhang

On behalf of the co-authors

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The topic is very interesting and important. However, I suggest to work out more clear the structure of the article. It would be recommendable to shorten the article and to focus on the most important resultsof the article.

 

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Dear Reviewer:

We have revised and updated the manuscript based on your suggestions and comments.

Attached is the replies to all comments.

 

Yours sincerely,

Yuanzhi Zhang

On behalf of the co-authors

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

As long as I can understand, the paper tries to evaluate the conditions of shelterings in urban large areas in case of an earthquake. The findings defined in the abstract at lines 29-31 are quite clear " the open space distribution does not match the dynamic population distribution, and inadequate preparation leads to some districts lack of safe evacuation place and people are under the high earthquake secondary disasters". This is a really important finding and these aims where previously remarked by many publications and critical reviews on earthquake planning in the urban built environment. Nevertheless, the rest of the work is really messy and lead me to provide a major list of revisions to be performed before reconsidering the manuscript.

Firstly, the literature review is not updated and precise. Secondly, the methodology is unclear. You need to re-elaborate the phases of the work and the specific steps carried out in each of them. Some specific factors are not completely considered in this work, as discussed below. Results are quite messy and some information is lacking at all. Nevertheless, there are many interesting issues, such as the vitality maps, hot points and related methodologies, that can be considered as prominent aspects of this work. In Particular, I really appreciate the effort in POI description and discussion in Section 4.2, from Figure 8 to Figure 9. I think that this is the most important part of the contribution, but it is messy with respect to the other parts of the paper. In view of the above, I think that the authors have been revised the work without checking the consistency of the parts.

Building debris after the earthquake are not considered at all, although they are one of the fundamental elements for evacuation and sheltering selection and evaluation. It is not clear why you performed this choice. Other lacks on pedestrians' behaviour and speed exist. In this sense, "self-motivated" seems to be poorly consistent with the research actions.

Finally, I think that a case-study oriented work is always interesting but methodology application issues and results should be discussed in view of future efforts by, e.g., other municipalities. Furthermore, I think you should try to define some main outcomes that can be applied to other urban contexts similar to the ones of the case study, e.g. in terms of the urban tissue.

Specific points follow:

TITLE & ABSTRACT:

1. the relevance of self-motivated term in the text is unclear. Also compare to the following comment 2 to the introduction section.
2. please avoid acronyms since they are not common for all the researchers
3. this sentence has no meaning to me: " This study provides an open space as emergency shelter evaluation model, which can apply to most Canadian cities."

INTRODUCTION:

1. the section is too long and complex, and work aims are not evidenced in a specific subsection (with the title). I encourage the authors to divide the introduction from a literature review section
2. at the meanwhile, the discussion on evacuation behaviours is too poor and references should be updated. I invite the authors to look into famous scientific journal databases, including Scopus, by searching for some keywords like TITLE-ABS-KEY ( human  AND behaviours  AND earthquake  AND evacuation  AND urban OR SHELTERING). Self-motivated means "people perform spontaneous evacuation procedures"? Compare the literature in this sense. Please mainly consider that there are many researchers based on videotapes analysis in real-world events, and performed in the last years, that can support your assumptions. You cannot avoid considering them. Please also revise them in order to mitigate your statements at lines 42-47, which seem to be limited to very specific researches and just valid for the Canadian context. Nevertheless, there are few works concerning evacuation site and path selection that discussed such issues all over the world. The matter is so important to be linked only to the Canadian context, at least in the introduction/literature review section. 
3. lines 49-52: are these overview lines needed? why did you not concentrate the attention on which sheltering areas are you inquiring? You should better define sheltering also in relation to their use over time. Are you meaning assembly areas, including safe meeting areas, or recovery areas? Please compare, e.g., DOI: 10.1016/j.ssci.2020.104700 . Please solve this issue in view of line 293 statement.
4. in Section 1.1, please revise according to the previous point 2 to update and enrich the related studies. Some basic works, e.g. DOI: 10.1016/j.ijdrr.2018.11.001 are ignored in this section, as well as in the following Section 1.3.1
5. please provide a clear definition of "open spaces" according to the existing literature and the previous works on evacuation behaviours: are you talking about squares, parks, green areas, stadia, streets? Furthermore, why only "Public" and not "private" open spaces? Are you meaning "open to the public, freely accessible by the population"?
6. define Points of Interests (POI) in the introduction section, at the first acronym occurrence
7. Figure 1: Please better discuss the presence of shelters in quantitative terms, e.g. how many shelters for square kilometres of the city or for the urban district, or in terms of distance from significant areas in the city. Please also think about moving Figure 1 to the case study discussion. Please also consider that shelterings in downtown and historical urban fabric are a critical element in evacuation layout definition, so it is crucial to give clearer evidence of their positions in respect to peripherical areas in the city.

SECTION 2:

1. Lines 189-190: what does it mean "Consider about the data accessibility and the administrative rules similarity"?

SECTION 3:

1. Lines 222-224: this is a work aim, not a methodological issue
2. Line 226: please change " authoritative websites" into "website of local authorities"; Line 228: why " respectively based"?
3. Figure 3 is quite complex. Could you link each part to the following methodological description/sections?
4. Line 297: please give a definition of " safety, accessibility and availability" when they are introduced, also in view of the literature references
5. I cannot understand the list from a1 to 4 at lines 304-362. No connection to " safety, accessibility and availability" is provided. Please clarify. Codes are not consistent with the text description
6. Fire hazard (line 304) discussion should be supported by references, to give a clear correlation with the supposed hazard-increasing factors
7. road accessibility at line 318 is not clear. How are you considering the risk levels? Why did you not consider building debris due to the earthquake?
8. line 325: the capability also depends on damages of the area.
9. line 330: I cannot evaluate how " The average gradient of each open space is calculated "
10. I cannot judge lines form 338 to 362 since they are not included in a methodological framework that can clarify how they are correlated, and why
11. As for the previous lines, steps from line 370-385 and from 402-404 are not discussed in view of the overall methodology and of the precise calculation steps
12. Why are you not considering any factor on evacuees' safety due to the evacuation process? Please better discuss the choices in Section 3.3.2. Considered evacuation speeds in Section 3.3.2 seems to be limitedly consistent with experimental data on earthquake evacuation database. Please specify why did you assume these values in respect to real-world observations (please check in Scopus, for instance, as suggested in the introduction section, point 2). Reference 46 should be avoided since it is not a recent work, it is based on a simulation rather than a real-world analysis and there are many better new approaches to evacuation simulations used at now to this issue.
13. According to the previous comment on Section 3.3.2, please consider the risk of the paths to the shelterings in a more precise manner. 

SECTION 4 - RESULTS:

1. The figure is toooooooo small and I cannot see anything that can support me in evaluating the results. Please better link Figure 5 to Section 3.3.1 and give clear description of the terms in both the figure and the caption. The criteria weight pie chart is not understandable
2. lines 439-440: how did you assume this result?
3. line 454: where is the Patricia Bay highway in figure 6?
4. line 458: " emergency shelters in Victoria are all small in size,": where can I evaluate this result? please give more details. I can see the lower value in Figure 6b, but it could be also related to the number of areas in the district.  
5. Figure 6 is hard to be understood. The lines are not needed. Please consider another way to represent the data in a graphical way. Please avoid using such a number of decimals, it is a bit confusing! Maybe, could you move to percentage terms?
6. Data from Figure 1 and Section 4.2 in terms of emergency sheltering areas are not consistent. Way?
7. " gaping holes" in Section 4.2. are not defined in terms of methodology. I can believe that a really larger number of gaping holes in Figure 7 could exist, according to a naif view of the map.

SECTION 5 - DISCUSSION:

1. You provide a long discussion on the comparison between the city districts in Section 5.1. It is a good point. A similar approach is proposed to Section 5.2, to improve emergency planning. Nevertheless, I wonder if you can provide insights for other application scenarios, including those similar to the case study, also in terms of urban tissue configuration or use by the population.
2. some methodological discussion are reported in Section 6.1. I think you should move the capability discussion herein.
3. Line 614: you are mentioning dynamic conditions for evacuation planning. What about the use of simulation models to support your evaluations?

SECTION 6 - CONTRIBUTIONS?

1. Firstly: why this title? why are limitations included herein and not in the discussion section? why is there no conclusion section?
2. Limitations should be included in the discussion, in my opinion
3. Further improvement connected to evacuation plan analysis by simulation tools and including human behaviours is needed.
4. lines 652-654: please give more details on it

Minor issues:

1) there are some inconsistencies with the use of parenthesis, as for [] in the introduction section

2) check clerical errors, such typos (muti=>multi) and incorrect positions of figure panels (e.g. a and b line 193), repetitions of section titles, sections numbering

3) insert the access date (last access) for website documentations

4) please avoid citing works published in Chinese, that cannot be checked by foreign readers.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer:

We have revised and updated the manuscript based on your suggestions and comments.

Attached is the replies to all comments.

 

Yours sincerely,

Yuanzhi Zhang

On behalf of the co-authors

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

The paper has improved a lot. I would still recommend to improve English language.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you for your comments. We have revised and improved as you suggested.

Attached is the reply to all comments.

 

Best regards,

Yuanzhi

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

I really appreciate the efforts of the authors to improve the paper. I firstly would like to evidence that the way the authors' reply is structure is really difficult to be understood. A classical structure should reply, point-by-point, the request of the reviewers, since he/she could verify the changes to the manuscript. Nevertheless, the Quality of Presentation has been improved, although many points are still open and require major revisions. In particular, the following points follow according to the previous comments (PC), your response or an excerpt of it (R) and my additional comment (AC), by numbering them

INTRODUCTION, PC 1 to 4

• R: "I want to say the first step of the evacuation is self-motivated without any help. "
• AC: anyway, you cannot avoid defining the works which state that "the first step of the evacuation is self motivated"

INTRODUCTION, PC 5:

• R: "Open spaces in this case are public parks. Yes, they are open to public and belong to government not private, which is open to all people."
• AC: anyway, some private areas are open to the public. SO you should only define that open spaces are public parks. In this sense, you can be supported by: E.L. French, S.J. Birchall, K. Landman, R.D. Brown, Designing public open space to support seismic resilience: A systematic review, International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction. 34 (2019) 1–10. doi:10.1016/j.ijdrr.2018.11.001.

INTRODUCTION, PC 7:

• R: "All information is provided on the map"
• AC: Figure 1 is now Figure 2, and it is placed on the area discussion. This is a good point. Anyway, I still think that the figure could support the discussion but please better discuss the presence of shelters in quantitative terms, e.g. how many shelters for square kilometres of the city or for the urban district, or in terms of distance from significant areas in the city. Furthermore, how di you select the shelters in the figure street image? which is the ratio? are they representative of the other shelters? Please also give a clear reference about the position of the old town into the general map that is placed on the bottom-left part of the figure. Divide the figure into subpanels, by different number or capital letters, and describe each part of the figure. Finally, please compare the inconsistencies due to SECTION 4, PC 6 reply.

SECTION 3, PC 5:

• R: " Criteria has been defined: For example, an ineligible shelter must meet..."
• AC: why "for example"? are you providing a general rule or not?

SECTION 3, PC 6:

• R: "Yes, but too small size open space is not very valuable. Previous studies normally use 2m^2/person as the emergency shelters standard"
• AC: firstly, some additional works also use 3pp/m2 to define safety areas, since this is the limit for contacts between people in waiting areas. 2pp/m2 is a reasonable conservative threshold. In addition, if you cannot consider the area damages (also according to rapid criteria such as geometrical ones, that correlates building heights and facing spaces width), you will always overestimate the number of people that can gather in the open space, because the debris area (not usable in the emergency) is still included. You are simplifying the approach, and this can be useful to wide-scale assessment in a preliminary step. I am not saying that this is an error, but just a limitation of the work that can be acceptable under some conditions (quick approach, wide-scale, negligible debris presence and so on). Please specify this paramount issue.

SECTION 3, PC 7:

• R: " This criteria does not make much sense"
• AC: This is true for your case study, but not for other cities. Please reason on it and describe it as a limitation in the discussion section

SECTION 3, PC 10:

• R: " We consider about people evacuation speed, and there are some aging population and tourists not familiar with the city so that the speed will be slop than average walking speed."
• AC: I appreciate the removal of reference 46, but no additional references have been requested as I previously required. Please check in Scopus, e.g. by DOI:10.1016/j.ssci.2015.09.001 or DOI: 10.1016/j.ssci.2018.12.028. On the contrary, specify that the assumption of speed is done under general speed databases

SECTION 3, PC 12:

• R: " The buildings are more than 3 floors and on the high ground applification risks area are consider as high risks collapsing buildings."
• AC: You can use these assumptions to revise the previous request on SECTION 3, PC 6. Anyway, references for this assumption are needed!

SECTION 4, PC 6:

• R: " Figure1 shows the exist shelters, they are indoor longterm shelters, which are always filly used and need appointment. This study is focus on the open space emergency shelters."
• AC: so, why did you shown the Figure 1 shelters if you are focusing on the open space rather than on buildings?

SECTION 5, PC 3: " What about the use of simulation models to support your evaluations?"

• R: NO SPECIFIC REPLY TO THIS POINT IS GIVEN
• AC: please consider to integrate these elements into the discussion of previous point 3 in the list, that is the ones on evacuation plans and population distribution dynamics. A reference to simulation tools is needed, according to my point of view.

SECTION 6, PC 2 and 3:

• R: " Not only the contribution mentioned in the method, but also some limitations of data resource and evaluation methodology. "
• AC: please include the limitations due to debris underestimation too

New comments follows:

1. the new title is too complex in the first part. Please revise it, e.g. A GIS-based system for spatio-temporal safety evaluation of open space used as emergency shelters...
2. references 8 to 10 about self-motivated evacuation are out of date. Please consider again to update them by Scopus databases!
3. Section 4.2: the numbered lists from lines 226 to 286 are hard to be understood, although the section has been revised. Additional problem: LINES 224-225, "there are five criteria that are relevant for emergency shelter site evaluation after an earthquake" but I can see only 3 points!
4. Section 4.3 points of list from lines 331 to 316 are not discussed in respect to the text, please provide a connection with the previous part of the section
5.  FIGURES: please consider to divide complex figures into panels, to describe each of them in the caption!
6. Figure 7: colors are terribly confusing! too dark areas, to low contrast!
7. Please revise again the english

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you for your comments. We have revised and improved as you suggested.

Attached is the reply to all comments.

 

Best regards,

Yuanzhi

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 3

Reviewer 3 Report

Dear authors, I think that the current paper version has been greatly improved. Anyway, some minor issues still follow, according to the previous comments (PC), your response or an excerpt of it (R) and my additional comment (AC), by numbering them.

INTRODUCTION, PC 7:

• R: These street images are from the website BC211, because they are representative of the indoor shelters in Victoria, which are large size, and in a building
• AC: I cannot understand again why introducing indoor context if you are working on outdoor spaces.

SECTION 3, PC 6:

• R: in Great Victoria case study, there is no building 
• AC: does it means that no building face the open spaces AND that no building is placed inside it?

SECTION 3, PC 10:

• R: “Gabriele using videotapes data"
• AC: The surname of the first author is not Gabriele, please check or avoid naming the authors since the reference is included. ANyway, the sentence should be rephrased: firstly, pointing out the assumed speed; secondly, the value is lower than literature ones, thus adopting a conservative approach

SECTION 5, PC 3

• R: "A population simulation can be introduced to estimate the population dynamics distribution"
• AC: this is a good reply although no comments on EVACUATION SIMULATION is offered.

SECTION 6, PC 2 and 3:

• R: Due to the limited of the open resource data, some of the secondary disasters, such as: debris
• AC: building debris is a consequence of the earthquake, not a cascading disaster! Flood can be a secondary disaster. To be checked

ADDITIONAL COMMENTS:

b) updated references: "Thapa, R.; Rijal, H. B.; Shukuya, M. Field study on acceptable indoor temperature in temporary shelters built in Nepal after massive earthquake 2015. Building and environment 2020, 135, 330-343." is not consistent. Please avoid using it!

 

c) PC: Section 4.2: the numbered lists from lines 226 to 286 are hard to be understood, although the section has been revised. => The REPLY IS NOT CONSISTENT! You should Introduce why you have a list form line 266 to line 300, that is from "1) Decision matrix can be constituted of xij: ..." to "7) Open space evaluation score Si:..." .You should do the same from line 335 to line 343, that includes "1) The estimation of the coupling degree in the district:"  and "2) The population can arrive emergency shelters within 15 minutes: "

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you very much for your new comments.

We have revised and improved according to your comments and suggestions as attached.

 

Yours sincerely,

Yuanzhi Zhang

On behalf of all co-authors

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

This manuscript is a resubmission of an earlier submission. The following is a list of the peer review reports and author responses from that submission.

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

1. It is a widely known method to use open space as a shelter in the event of a tsunami. There is no clear distinction from previous studies.
2. Closed evacuation areas are less restricted in terms of evacuation time (time to stay) than open evacuation areas. In other words, closed evacuation areas need a standard for their stay time. Is there a method to solve this problem?
3. If an open space is used as a shelter, the role of a manager become more difficult than when using a closed space is used. The guidelines for evacuating from open spaces and those for evacuating closed spaces should be different. Is there a method to solve this problem?

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you very much for your comments. We have revised and updated according to your comments and suggestions.

But the English checking was made outside and yet not come back. 

Due to the deadline today, we submitted the revised version and will upload the English checking time 7 days later as it needs to be checked for 5 days.

Yours sincerely,

Yuanzhi Zhang

On behalf of all coauthors

 

 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear authors, thank you for your very interesting and innovative article. It is very interesting, but in my opinion there are several points to be significantly improved to be suitable for publication.

1- First, you need to follow the template within the instructions for authors to have an acceptable style and layout.

2- Not enough basic information is provided to understand the problem facing Canada and the study area.

3- The images need to be significantly improved.

In the attached pdf you can find all the detailed comments.

Good job!  

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you very much for your comments. We have revised and updated the manuscript according to your comments and suggestions.

But the English checking was made outside and yet not coming back. 

Due to the deadline today, we submitted the revised version and will upload the English checking time 7 days later as it needs to be checked for 5 days.

Yours sincerely,

Yuanzhi Zhang

On behalf of all coauthors

 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Dear Authors 

Thank you so much for your valuable study. You pointed out very important research question in this article. However, your article is seriously weak and has multiple flaws which need to be addressed to make it strong for publication in any journal. I believe following comment may help you to improve the manuscript. 

1. Your research design is very superficial in terms of research design, methodological process, and result discussion. 
2. Introduction part is not consistent and coherent. I did not find any focus or direction in your text which can lead reader to a specific direction.
3. You did not stated your goal of this research in your introduction section properly. 
4. You should provide a structured methodology. you tried to to a some multi-criteria decision making, however you did not provide any basis for the selection of criterion. 
5. Research discussion should be alined with your background statement. 
6. . You do not have any clear statement about your findings.
7. If you look into your abstract, you may see you did not add any findings of your research in abstract. Abstract only includes problem statement, your objective and a little focus on methods. 
8. Last but not least, this manuscript should go through extensive English editing (language and grammar). Here is an example of inconsistent and incoherent writing                                                                           "The allocation of shelters related to location is mainly supported by
   Geography Information System (GIS), and other technologies. Safety is the most important and basic requirement for choosing the location of a shelter. The combination of GIS and digital elevation models (DEM) is widely used in landslide hazard assessment"                                                   As you see first line you are talking about GIS, second line about the importance of safety, third talking about DEM in  consecutive sentences. Please try to be consistent and coherent in your writing.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you very much for your comments. We have revised and updated the manuscript according to your comments and suggestions.

But the English checking was made outside and not yet coming back. 

Due to the deadline today, we submitted the revised version and will upload the English checking time 7 days later as it needs to be checked for 5 days.

Yours sincerely,

Yuanzhi Zhang

On behalf of all coauthors

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear authors,
thank you for responding to a good portion of my reviews and suggestions. I am sorry, however, that some have been completely ignored and I have not even been given a reason or explanation for this refusal.
Despite this, the manuscript is improved and I can only add a few minor revisions which I hope will be considered.
After these revisions, in my opinion, the manuscript can be accepted for publication.

Lines 194-195: I would enter abbreviations with capital letters; check it throughout the text.

Line 333: Some references are necessary here.

Figure 3: A legend is also required in the figure on the left; if the colors are the same as the figure on the right, please move the legend outside (for example below) the image or specify it in the caption

Figure 4: Insert some toponym or park's name that you name in the text also in the image

Figure 6: The symbology size on the map and in the legend should be the same, especially for available parks.   References, Lines 496-561: See the instruction for authors template for style and layout

Reviewer 3 Report

Dear Author 

I do not think that the revised version of the manuscript improved a lot considering the research design and methodological process.