Quite a mouthful, that title: “Road network disruptions during extreme flooding events and their impact on the access to emergency medical services: A spatiotemporal vulnerability analysis”. From a Swiss-Austrian team comes this interesting analysis of how disruptions in the road network of the canton of Berne that are induced by extreme flooding events affect the population’s access to emergency medical services (EMS). The paper is open-access.
It seems, event-specific EMS accessibility is an under-studied topic, but certainly relevant with extreme rain and flooding events on the increase due to climate change. The researchers studied accessibility and changes in accessibility in 1 km spatial and 1 hour temporal resolution through a simulated flooding event over six days, among other things.
From the paper:
In the context of flood disasters, further investigation into complex and cascading impacts would be advantageous for more informed and effective management of dynamic flood risk. (…) existing infrastructure was designed before increasingly more extreme events due to climate change have been and expect to continue occurring. Preparing for rare but high consequence flood events is a core part of undertaking anticipatory actions by emergency managers, rather than acting only after the onset of a flood event. Such preparations involve custom measures that incorporate local context to reduce societal vulnerabilities.