Malaysians are increasingly finding themselves exposed to disasters especially land slides and flood. However, concern can be raised about citizen’s preparedness of disasters. This paper discusses the level of disaster preparedness among Malaysians from a survey of 346 citizens to assess their perceptions of disaster issues, and their attitudes towards increasing the disaster preparedness.
The use of ICTs has been highly advocated for addressing the obstacles and improving decision-making in the event of a disaster. A number of ICT support systems and frameworks have evolved over time to support the highly time and collaboration intensive task of emergency and disaster management. This paper is based on a survey of the existing systems, ongoing research projects, supporting systems and concepts. These systems have been classified based on their use in the four stages of Comprehensive Emergency Management (CEM).
The Rescue Services in Finland have a significant problem of communication with other authorities who also participate in the rescue process. The greatest challenge is a lack of shared programs, applications or any other e-services which they can use to communicate with each other. The cloud computing combined with Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) might be the answer for this problem. There are several solutions and guidelines available.
This paper introduces the recent extreme rainfall-induced landslide disasters and results of ring shear tests showing the triggering mechanism of rapid and long run-out landslides. It introduces an attempt of ICT-based landslide micro-topography mapping using Google Earth. Finally, it also aims to provide new participatory work and learning for creating better and reliable hazard mapping.
This publication, the first of South Asia Department’s South-South learning series, aims to showcase lessons, replicable practices, and other insights which development practitioners can learn from, and apply in, the context of their respective countries. Projects discussed here represent various sectors such as energy, urban development, transport, information and communications technology (ICT), irrigation, and disaster risk reduction.
This report examines four different issue areas to analyze how social media is used in the context of risk and crisis communication. These areas include: public safety and preparedness; emergency warnings, alerts and requests for assistance; recovery efforts; and, finally, monitoring and situational awareness. In the context of each of these areas, it highlights the key literature and real-life examples to explore the risks vs. opportunities in the utility of social media. These four areas capture the role of engagement and strategy in both the risk and crisis space.
This joint effort draws on the wealth of existing expertise across numerous organizations and previous research to codify a series of best conduct practices for the use of SMS in disaster response. This guideline document is a collaborative work in progress and therefore neither fully comprehensive nor entirely complete. This effort focuses exclusively on “natural” disasters and thus currently excludes reference to political crises and complex humanitarian emergencies.
For disaster exploration and surveillance application, this paper aims to present a novel application of a multi-robot agent based on WSN and to evaluate multi-hop communications supported by robotics used in subterranean tunnel. The paper proposes a Primary-Scout Multi-Robot System (PSMRS) and reports on the implementation of a chain topology in a subterranean environment using a trimmed ZigBee2006 protocol stack to build the multi-hop communication network.
In this paper, interest is in the rapid detection of disaster events such as tsunami, tornadoes, forest fires, and earthquakes. The detection system of disaster events is described and the way to detect a target event from Twitter data is also shown in this paper. The research examines three disasters during the same time period and compares Twitter activity and Internet news on Google. A significant result from this research is that emergency detection could begin using the microblogging service.
This paper proposes a geo spatial information repository for initial condition reporting and updating to guide search and rescue operations and deployment of equipment with safety considerations for the rescuers in large scale disaster response scenarios.
