The Aesthetic Man-made Hill: An Alternative Tsunami Vertical Evacuation for Padang City, West Sumatera, Indonesia

Abstract

Geologists have been a long time warned that Padang, a city of more than nine hundred thousand peoples, could one day be probability destroyed by an earthquake and tsunami because of its location, i.e. flat terrain and close to the offshore thrust-fault seismic hazard. About half of the city's population live close to the coast and within a five-meter elevation above the sea level. Padang peoples have been amply demonstrated in previous West Sumatra earthquakes that most of the panic' peoples, the exodus to the higher-level area by using cars and motorbikes. As the results, a chaos and traffic jams at several points on the evacuation road and prevented peoples to reach the safe area.This situation suggests that Padang city requires the vertical evacuation facilities to overcome the circumstance mentioned above. Indeed, several multistory buildings are located on the coastal area of the Padang city, enabled to be used as the tsunami evacuation shelters when tsunami run into the city. Unfortunately, especially on the northern part of the city, due to dense population whom living close to the coast area and limitation of the number of the multistory buildings make them still in high-risk to tsunami hazard. In this paper, a nine-meter high of an aesthetic man-made hill is proposed as an alternative vertical evacuation place in it dense population area. A man-made hill is designed to accommodate more than 10,000 evacuees. The site's functional, the detail of engineering construction and the evacuation scenario are briefly discussed in this paper.In between tsunamis, it may be accessed by the community at any time as the public facilities such as recreation park and sports facility in around and on the top of the hill.