Emergency Management

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 paper outlines research conducted into CW systems in New South Wales (NSW) state government Emergency Service Agencies. This research highlights a unified collaborative approach to the assessment, development, deployment and use of Community Warning systems that is based on crisis management theory. This approach could be utilised by governments at federal, state and local levels for cross border and jurisdictional management of ESA informational, ICT and process resources.

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 study sets out to understand how social media is being used in disaster and emergency situations. Research thus far has established the importance of social media in disaster and crisis communication but neglects to describe why social media are important. To establish best practices of social media use in a disaster and why they should be used, this study interviewed six communication or social media experts in the field of disaster relief.

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.

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.

Climate change presents two types of disaster threat in developing countries. One is the potentially devastating impact on vulnerable communities of more frequent and more intense extreme weather events. This contributes to the second threat, the compounding of what are already complex development problems leading to a potential downward development spiral for the world’s poor. Effective disaster response demands rapid access to reliable and accurate data and the capacity to assess, analyse and integrate information from varied sources. ICTs can contribute to improve this.