Monitoring and Analyzing the Effectiveness of the Effective Refuge Area of Emergency Shelters by Using Remote Sensing: A Case Study of Beijing’s Fifth Ring Road

Abstract

The effective refuge area is a key indicator in the study of emergency shelters. Accurately extracting the effective refuge area and analyzing the effectiveness of emergency shelters are of great significance for site selection, spatial distribution, and the evaluation of suitability. Beijing is one of only three capitals in the world located in a high-seismic-intensity zone of magnitude 8. The fast and accurate monitoring of effective refuge areas and an analysis of the effectiveness of emergency shelters are conducive to evacuation planning and disaster prevention and mitigation, and they promote the construction of a resilient city. However, the extraction of effective refuge areas in existing studies is not only a time-consuming and labor-intensive task but also has accuracy and efficiency problems, resulting in less precise validity analyses. In this paper, a remote sensing monitoring technology system for the effective refuge areas of emergency shelters is proposed based on multi-source data. Different methods were used to extract various land features, such as buildings and collapsed areas, water, dense areas of understory vegetation, and steep slope areas that cannot be evacuated, to obtain the effective refuge area at a detailed scale, in combination with the service radius of emergency shelters, the population distribution, and the actual road network, the criteria for effectiveness analysis were established for the effective open space ratio, capacity, per capita accessible effective refuge area, and population allocation gap. Taking the area within the Fifth Ring Road of Beijing as an example, the effectiveness of emergency shelters was analyzed at both the whole scale and a local scale. The results show that the effective refuge areas of different emergency shelters in Beijing vary significantly, with the smallest effective refuge area being located in Rings 2–3 and the largest one being located in Rings 4–5; between different regions, there are differences in the effectiveness. This study provides a feasible method for the fast, accurate, and detailed extraction of the effective refuge areas of emergency shelters and also provides a reference for emergency planning for disaster prevention and mitigation.