Disaster Management Plans Research Articles

Writing Structure of Disaster Management Planning Document in West Java

West Java Province is one of the provinces that have a tendency of high level of disaster in Indonesia. This requires serious attention from the government that must be incorporated into disaster management planning document in West Java. The research problem lies in the writing structure of the document. Qualitative approach with content analysis is used as the method. Documentation and interview studies are performed as the data collection technique. The research's' results show that the contents of disaster management planning documents in West Java has covered zones, strategies, focus, targets, priorities and activities arranged in sequence according to the format determined by the government in integrative manner. Our recommendation is that the disaster management in West Java still requires coordination and cooperation of several related parties.

Flood vulnerability assessment of urban buildings based on integrating high-resolution remote sensing and street view images

Urban flood risk management requires an extensive investigation of the vulnerability characteristics of buildings. Large-scale field surveys usually cost a lot of time and money, while satellite remote sensing and street view images can provide information on the tops and facades of buildings respectively. Thereupon, this paper develops a building vulnerability assessment framework using remote sensing and street view features. Specifically, a UNet-based semantic segmentation model, FSA-UNet (Fusion-Self-Attention-UNet) is proposed to integrate remote sensing and street view features and the vulnerability information contained in the images is fully exploited. And the building vulnerability index is generated to provide the spatial distribution characteristics of urban building vulnerability. The experiment shows that the mIoU of the proposed model can reach 82% for building vulnerability classification in Hefei, China, which is more accurate than the traditional semantic segmentation models. The results indicate that the integration of street view and remote sensing image features can improve the ability of building vulnerability assessment, and the model proposed in this study can better capture the correlation features of multi-angle images through the self-attention mechanism and combines hierarchy features and edge information to improve the classification effect. This study can support for disaster management and urban planning.

Gender mainstreaming efforts in disaster management plans: Case study West Nusa Tenggara province, Indonesia

Women are significantly vulnerable to disasters due to gender inequality. Many studies suggest that gender mainstreaming can help minimize women's vulnerability in a disaster. While national policies stipulate that disaster documents should be women-sensitive, no study identifies how local policies integrate gender-mainstreaming strategies within. This research identifies whether the current disaster management plans from seven regencies and municipalities in West Nusa Tenggara Province, one of the disaster-prone provinces in Indonesia, have included gender mainstreaming strategy in all disaster risk management (DRM) phases. Content analysis, a widely used qualitative research technique, was performed in the study. It revealed that every region had adopted at least one gender mainstreaming strategy in each DRM phase, except for West Lombok and East Lombok Regency. The result shows that there are commitments to mainstream gender within the system and to encourage equal access. However, relevant strategies supporting women's participation in DRM were absent in all investigated regions.

Analysis of Public Awareness about District Disaster Management Plan: A Case of Dehradun City.

Analysis of Public Awareness about District Disaster Management Plan: A Case of Dehradun City.

Customer satisfaction in records management at Botswana Examinations Council

This paper is extracted from a master’s dissertation titled, “An evaluation of customer satisfaction at Botswana Examinations Council Records Management Unit.” The purpose of this study was to investigate customer satisfaction at Botswana Examinations Council Records Management Unit (BEC RMU) using the SERVQUAL conceptual model. The study convergent mixed methods research approach with survey, interview, participant observation and document review as data collection tools. The findings of this study revealed that: the BEC RMU has adequate facilities, equipment and human resources that enable it to serve customers; there is no disaster management plan in the RMU; the RMU rarely conducts user needs assessment surveys and its officers use face-to-face communication, telephone, and emails to communicate with customers. The study recommends training for RMU officers in good customer service, management support, introduction of ERMS, workshops to sensitise RMU officers on customer service standards or any other related document, development of a disaster management plan, customer service programme and user needs assessment. The study further recommends orientation and induction of action officers.

AUTOMATIC BUILDING EXTRACTION FROM UAV-BASED IMAGES AND DSMs USING DEEP LEARNING

Abstract. Accurate and automatic building footprint extraction from single UAV images has become essential in many photogrammetry and remote sensing applications such as 3D building modeling, smart city, monitoring, disaster management, and urban planning. In this paper, the capability of U-Net architecture with ResNet as the backbone of the network is investigated to extract the building footprints from UAV-based orthophotos and normalized Digital Surface Models (nDSMs) considering the complementary nature of RGB and height information. The data has been captured from five non-overlapping rural scenes of Yazd province, Iran. After pre-processing, the training and test datasets are prepared to evaluate the performance of U-Net using different hyperparameters and input channels such as RGB (only orthophotos) and RGBD (orthophotos and nDSMs). The experiments highlight the effectiveness of height information to detect and extract the building footprints with significant improvements in precision from 89% to 97% and in recall from 77% to 91%.

COMPARING THE PERFORMANCE OF ROOF SEGMENTATION METHODS IN AN URBAN ENVIRONMENT USING DIGITAL ELEVATION DATA

Abstract. In this paper, we present a novel 3D segmentation approach using digital elevation data. Building detection has been emerging as an important area of research. It has attracted many applications, such as geomatics, architectonics, computer vision, photogrammetry, remote sensing, industry, disaster management, and city planning. Building detection techniques can basically be divided into two categories: the classical approach and the deep learning approach. The main goal of this study is to compare some commonly used detection techniques in photogrammetry, like segmentation-based and classification-based methods using digital elevation data as input. The 4 different methods of roof detection with their detailed analysis and their final results are presented in this paper. This study encourages researchers to further advance research in building detection techniques. Results show that the 2D region growing can successfully segment the building components like the main facades of the complex roof and provide accurate qualitative and quantitative results compared to the other methodologies used in this study.

World Organisation for Animal Health Members' Capacity to Deal With Animal Welfare Emergencies During Natural Disasters in Europe.

Little is known about individual European countries or regional capacity to respond to animal welfare emergencies during natural disasters; therefore, it is important to establish baseline information (eg, types of disasters, training) to enable more focused and data-driven actionable support for future disasters. A 55-question survey was distributed by an email link to the 53 World Organisation for Animal Health (WOAH) European Region Members plus 1 observer country. Forty-nine countries (91%, n = 54) responded to the survey. Fifty-one percent (25/49) indicated they incorporated animal welfare into their national disaster regulatory framework, whereas 59% (29/49) indicated animal welfare was incorporated in the Veterinary Service National Disaster Management and Risk Reduction Plan. Thirty-nine percent (19/49) indicated they had "no" or "limited" legal authority to manage animal emergencies in natural disasters. Floods, forest fires, and snowstorm/extreme cold were the 3 most commonly reported disasters over the last 10 years with 79% (27/34) reporting Veterinary Services was involved in managing these disasters. The survey results indicated a wide range in the capacity of WOAH European Member Countries to respond to animal welfare in natural disasters, highlighting the gaps and potential areas of improvement in this arena.

Diagnóstico e discussão sobre Planos Municipais de Redução de Riscos no Brasil

Abstract The disasters associated with landslides and floods forced the Brazilian Federal Government to launch, in 2003, a program aimed at encouraging the development of Local Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Plans (PMRRs - Planos Municipais de Redução de Riscos). Given the uniqueness of this action and the variety of institutions accounting for executing these plans, which involve different material and human resources, it is important explaining how PMRRs have been built in order to, likely, improve them. The aim of the current study is to gather information about all 33 PMRRs available on the website of the Ministry of Regional Development by focusing on the following items: composition of the technical team involved in them, popular participation, risk mapping, typologies and costs of proposed structural and non-structural actions. Among the herein reached conclusions, it is worth emphasizing the excessive asymmetry observed in PMRRs’ approach to physical aspects of this issue to the detriment of its social aspects, a fact that affects both the risk estimation method and the proposed mitigating measures.

Threshold Attention Network for Semantic Segmentation of Remote Sensing Images

Semantic segmentation of remote sensing images is essential for various applications, including vegetation monitoring, disaster management, and urban planning. Previous studies have demonstrated that the self-attention mechanism (SA) is an effective approach for designing segmentation networks that can capture long-range pixel dependencies. SA enables the network to model the global dependencies between the input features, resulting in improved segmentation outcomes. However, the high density of attentional feature maps used in this mechanism causes exponential increases in computational complexity. Additionally, it introduces redundant information that negatively impacts the feature representation. Inspired by traditional threshold segmentation algorithms, we propose a novel threshold attention mechanism (TAM). This mechanism significantly reduces computational effort while also better modeling the correlation between different regions of the feature map. Based on TAM, we present a threshold attention network (TANet) for semantic segmentation. TANet consists of an attentional feature enhancement module (AFEM) for global feature enhancement of shallow features and a threshold attention pyramid pooling module (TAPP) for acquiring feature information at different scales for deep features. We have conducted extensive experiments on the ISPRS Vaihingen and Potsdam datasets. The results demonstrate the validity and superiority of our proposed TANet compared to the most state-of-the-art models.

ANALYSIS OF INTERNATIONAL AND ARMENIAN METHODOLOGY FOR LOCAL LEVEL DISASTER RISK ASSESSMENT

Disaster Risk Assessment is done at two levels: National and Local. This article refers to the methodology of Disaster Risk Assessment at the Local level and examples of its application in RA. In particular, the authors of the article suggest supplementing the toolkit of Risk Assessment at the Local level, revising the methodology of GIS map creation. It is recommended to especially strengthen financial and economic assessment tools during the evaluation stage, so that it is possible to implement the Disaster Risk Reduction or Management Plans prepared by the Disaster Risk Assessment methodology and to clearly calculate the volumes and directions of financial investments for risk reduction.

CHANGE IN OLDER ADULTS’ SELF-EFFICACY TO HANDLE DISASTERS AFTER A PREPAREDNESS PROGRAM: ROLE OF SOCIAL NETWORKS

Abstract Social support networks provide a context within which older adults maintain their safety and well-being. Preparing for disasters and emergency situations can help older adults stay safe independent after a disaster. Self-efficacy to prepare for and handle disaster situations can influence how older adults proactively prepare and protect themselves. Fifty-four older adults 61 to 92 years of age in Eastern Iowa were interviewed before and after participating in an intervention program that helped them develop personalized disaster management plans. Participants reported seven support network members on average, ranging from one to 23. About one-third of the network members were participants’ children and grandchildren, 11% were their siblings and parents, and 58% were non-family members such as friends and neighbors. Out of 549 network members identified, 245 were selected as someone participants can depend on during emergency situations; 47% were family whereas 43% were non-family members. Participants who reported higher numbers of network members whom they can depend on in emergency situations at baseline showed more increase in self-efficacy to manage disasters one-month after receiving the intervention (p=0.02). Having social support network members whom older adults feel they can turn to during emergency situations may help boost their confidence in handling and preparing for disasters through participating in a disaster preparedness program. Participants indeed identified additional members whom they could depend on in disaster situations after the intervention. Future studies may test strategies to enhance social support networks to increase confidence among older adults to prepare for and handle disasters.

CRITERIA AND ATTRIBUTES FOR THE 20-MINUTE CITY CONCEPT (KP20M) IN BALIK PULAU, PULAU PINANG

This article reports on the progress of a community project that involves Universiti Sains Malaysia, PLANMalaysia, Penang Disaster Management Committee and local community organisations. The purpose of this project is to measure the suitability of this neighbourhood in Balik Pulau that qualifies to be considered as a pilot project that is able to achieve a level comparable to the pilot project in Melbourne, Australia. This 20-Minute City project aims to assess the attributes and criteria, examine the study area’s preparedness to address disaster based on the assessed attributes and criteria, and strengthen the resilience of the study area via practising locally mould 20-Minute City attributes and criteria. This is done by looking at the use of space (spatial) and capacity (public facilities, infrastructure, buildings & other land use categories) based on the needs of existing communities. 20-Minute City Concept was initially brought forward to promote the idea of living locally – people can meet most of their needs within a 20-minute walk from home. COVID-19 has abruptly tweaked living locally into living sustainably, where the profound COVID-19 destructive effect has accelerated the necessity of developing a community that is resilient to risk. The study area technically has 20-Minute City’s attributes and criteria; however, they are yet to be fully assessed on its readiness aspect. This study is appropriately done now to see this concept potentially incorporated in some Malaysia development policies, especially after the COVID-19 outbreak as a pandemic since this new city concept has become a new trend of new neighbourhood norm. Understanding the feasibility of these attributes and criteria will help in planning an effective disaster management plan which then creates a resilient and competitive community towards understanding distances and features as being practised in the 20-minute neighbourhoods in Australia.

Disaster Psychology and Psychological Adaptation of Disasters: Evidence From Riverine Islands (Char) of Rural Bangladesh

Natural hazards disrupt the social-ecological system, causing much suffering, death, injury, and devastation of property and the environment. This study explores the factors influencing the disaster psychology and psychological adaptation of people living in disaster-vulnerable areas in Bangladesh. Data have been collected from 100 households in Bangladesh’s riverine island areas (char) of northern Bangladesh. Several criteria have been used to measure char dwellers’ disaster psychology (vulnerability concern, factor, and intensity) and psychological adaptation (weakness concern and emotional response). This study reveals that char dwellers perceived several hazards like floods (100%), riverbank erosion (83%), drought (29%), and earthquakes (14%). It is also found that females (88%) are more concerned about earthquakes than males (12%). The key vulnerability factors in the char areas are geographic position (100%), no access to migration (75%), resources (76%), housing (83%), training (18%), and alternative livelihood (24%). Flood and drought are identified as the most destructive hazards in char areas. Most household heads also felt anxiety (88%), fear (54%), helplessness, sadness, and anger due to natural hazards. The government should implement a context-specific disaster management plan to reduce household vulnerability and create livelihood opportunities in char areas to enhance char dwellers’ psychological resilience against disasters.

Inborn errors of metabolism refuse to stay-at-home: Experiences of a state-wide biochemical genetics service during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The New South Wales (NSW) biochemical genetics (BG) service in Australia developed business continuity plans (BCPs) in response to the COVID-19 pandemic to ensure the essential service remained operational. This article aims to discuss the effects of the COVID-19 BCPs on the NSW BG service and patient care. BCPs were developed that included charting of NSW BG service workflow and services against staff resources and clinical impact on patients. The effect of the BCPs was analysed quantitatively by reviewing key performance indicators (result turnaround time, frequency and severity of clinical incidents and laboratory nonconformities) and qualitatively from staff feedback generated by a BG laboratory-wide survey. Alternative BCPs were implemented during the pre-defined period March 2020 to November 2021 (inclusive), to reflect changes in COVID-19 community transmission, vaccination rates; and health orders. Operation of our essential pathology service was maintained, with no significant difference observed in key performance indicators when compared to pre-COVID. During the pre-defined period of the COVID-19 pandemic, staff reported increased levels of both work- and out-of-work-related stress. The successful continuation of the BG service, with no statistically significant impact on patient care and delivery of essential services, can be attributed to strategic planning and timely implementation of these BCPs. In conjunction with the resilient and robust attitude of the staff during this ever-changing situation, this experience has served as an invaluable tool for future disaster management planning.

A Method for the Definition of Emergency Rescue Routes Based on the Out-of-Plane Seismic Collapse of Masonry Infills in Reinforced-Concrete-Framed Buildings

One of the main goals of disaster management planning is to ensure the effectiveness of the emergency measures when a hazard occurs. This happens only if the decision-makers use operational tools considering the structural characteristics of urban systems. Starting from these assumptions, the authors proposed an emergency management method based on the integrated work between two different scientific sectors, the urban planning and construction engineering sectors. The proposed method aims to evaluate the practicability of the strategic road network, as well as defining the emergency rescue routes based on the out-of-plane (OOP) seismic collapse of masonry infills (MIs) in reinforced concrete (RC)-framed buildings. The OOP failure of MIs is predicted according to an innovative MI macro-model. The authors test the method on a geographic area in the municipality of Gioia Tauro (Reggio Calabria, Italy). The results show that due to the collapse of MIs, the functionality of the strategic road network in emergency conditions can be compromised, causing losses of the urban systems’ performance. Based on the obtained results, the authors recommend that decision-makers use the proposed methodology to identify the vulnerable rescue paths and to locate the strategic infrastructure while spending the financial resources in a more effective way.

Ecosystem-Based Disaster Management Planning for the Eastern Coast of India

Elango, N. and Arul, C., 2023. Ecosystem-based disaster management planning for the eastern coast of India. Journal of Coastal Research, 39(1), 83–89. Charlotte (North Carolina), ISSN 0749-0208. The coastal zone of India is endowed with abundant coastal and marine ecosystems. India is also highly prone to natural calamities, especially floods, droughts, cyclones, and landslides. This study aims to highlight the importance of the ecosystem services along the east coast of India and incorporate the value of these resources at the planning stage of disaster management at all levels. A survey was conducted with experts at the national level who have an understanding of the existing disaster management plans along the coast of Tamil Nadu state. To understand the importance of ecosystem-based disaster risk reduction at the decision-making and planning level, further analysis was carried out in monetization of ecosystem services. The total value of ecosystem services was obtained as the product of landuse area and the value of ecosystem services. From the overall critical analysis and the initial online survey, it was inferred that ecosystem-based approaches to disaster risk reduction and managing climate change hold much promise and that investing in healthy ecosystems provides a viable route for sustainable development. There needs to be a shift from relying on structural engineering solutions to increased acceptance of social engineering approaches through consensus-building with disaster-affected communities. Despite the structural and nonstructural measures being implemented in lieu of disaster management, there is still a lacuna in effective implementation, as inferred from the study. Robust actions are needed at the planning stage, for which the adoption of ecosystem-based approaches with localised resources and knowledge would be an inclusive approach.

Automated Mapping of Flood Inundation Areas using Cloud Based Processing Tools of Google Earth Engine for Efficient Disaster Management – A Case Study of Kerala Floods

Availability of reliable information on extent and impact of flood becomes critical for faster and efficient disaster management planning. Access to near realtime satellite data from optical and microwave sensors on Google Earth Engine (GEE) platform helps in rapid flood inundation mapping. Also, integration of Optical and Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data from Sentinel series of satellites helps in detection of landuse/landcover features like Built-up, Agriculture Lands and Water bodies under flooding. The GEE platform provides extensive library tools for simultaneous pre-processing of SAR images and cloud free optical images from multiple satellites. In this research, Differential Thresholding and Differential Smoothening algorithms developed in GEE have been applied on Pre and Post SAR images for automatic identification of flood inundation areas. The inundated areas thus delineated were validated with inundation extents provided by the National Database for Emergency Management (NDEM). The methodology of automation developed in this study is applied to severe floods occurred in Kerala, India during August 2018. The sensitivity of polarization on mapping accuracy is estimated using Vertical- Horizontal (VH) and Vertical-Vertical (VV) modes available with Sentinel-1 data. The result indicates that VV mode of polarization provides better accuracy of 96% than VH mode. The coding is implemented in GEE environment with automation to provide extent of flood inundation for efficient management and mitigation planning during flood disasters.

Coastal hazards mapping using high-resolution UAV image and DEM. A Case study in Siung Beach, Gunungkidul, Indonesia

The southern coast of Gunungkidul, which is adjacent to the subduction zone, is prone to various coastal hazards. The increasing number of visitors to the beach leads to more exposure and increases the risks. This study aims to determine the coastal hazards in Siung Beach, Gunungkidul, Yogyakarta. A high-resolution aerial image and DEM were acquired using a low-cost Unmanned Aerial Vehicle. The acquired images were processed using Structure from Motion (SfM) photogrammetry to generate an orthomosaic image with 5cm spatial resolution. A worst-case tsunami hazard scenario (12 m) was executed using raster filtering on the generated UAV-DEM. Based on the tsunami inundation model, most of the buildings are affected by the worst-case tsunami scenario. According to orthomosaic interpretation, rip current hazard is also spotted on the eastern part of the beach. The rip current is considered a channel rip, a stationary rip current affected by the bathymetric condition. Potential rockfall due to slope instability might be occurred on the southern part of the beach, as a former enormous mass movement can be delineated from the orthomosaic image. Siung Beach is formed by the combination of volcanic origin and karst process, resulting in undulating topography. Due to various coastal hazards in Siung beach, disaster management planning should be established to reduce the risks.

Disaster Management in the IVF LAB

Assisted Reproductive Technologies have evolved to become an everyday treatment for infertility. Clinics and laboratories dedicated to the development and cryopreservation of gametes and embryos, are found in all parts of the world, not in just developed countries. This widespread presence of ART clinics has meant that reports of rare natural disasters, or other destructive events upending the normalcy of clinics and hospitals, have increased in frequency. In turn this has provided the opportunity to learn from the experience of others. This presentation will consider how ART clinics worldwide have developed well-thought-out disaster management plans to ensure the continuation of patient care.