Sharing the post-earthquake situation for emergency response management in transborder areas: The e-Atlas tool

Abstract

Usually, the response after a disastrous event requires decision-makers in emergency operative rooms to quickly outline and understand the current post-event situation, for planning and defining strategies for a contextualized response. Moreover, in many cases, disastrous events affect cross-border territories and/or involve multiple organizations in responding to the demand generated by the event. These cases require a harmonized and coordinated response by all the institutions/subjects involved in emergency management. To address this challenge, this paper proposes the e-Atlas (emergency atlas) tool for showing and sharing information that embraces a response management perspective to explicitly support decision-makers in managing the criticalities of a post-earthquake situation. The e-Atlas has been designed and tested to: i) acquire sensible information for allowing decision-makers to understand in almost real-time the post-earthquake situational picture, and ii) share the representation of the situational picture among different users, allowing each of them to use it according to its specific requirements. Applications of the tool are illustrated, to show how it is used in a transborder context in the North-East area of Italy.