Disaster Recovery Research Articles

Regulating belonging: Contradictions in Puerto Rico’s agricultural land-use policies

Zoning regulates which land uses belong on land. Also, zoning ordinances signal the local government’s intent for land use regulation and its consequent exclusion of land uses, activities, and people. Exclusionary zoning has been well studied in urban settings, but less is known about its impact on farmlands. The archipelago of Puerto Rico serves as an important case to examine recent land-use policy changes and the government’s intent on agricultural lands. This paper examines the 2010, 2015, 2019, 2020, and 2022 Joint Permit Regulations to ask: What rhetorical work do these five regulations employ for agricultural land? What insights do each of the Joint Permit Regulation offer about the government’s intent for agricultural land? How do these regulations shape Puerto Rico’s agricultural landscape and whose interest do they serve? To answer these questions, I employ two policy analytical methods, policy archeology and genealogy, along with five key subject-matter experts’ interviews to assess how municipal-level zoning policies articulate territorialized politics of belonging on agricultural land zoned as productive agriculture (agrícola productivo, in Spanish). Theoretical thematic analysis from interviews with subject-matter experts shows how the official planning discourse in Puerto Rico uses the cover of disaster recovery and sustainable development to foster land dispossession and exclusion of farmers on Puerto Rico’s most valuable agricultural land.

Hydrology Report of Sambhar Lake: A Safe Haven Past Disaster Recovery

Hydrology Report of Sambhar Lake: A Safe Haven Past Disaster Recovery

Filling the blindspots: Assessing distributive equity in fund allocation of Florida's local housing program for disaster recovery

Despite the role of local assistance in addressing households' disaster recovery needs, few studies have examined the role of localized programs in filling the gaps that might exist in federal programs. To address the question of whether local recovery funds distribute resources to socially vulnerable neighborhoods and how local assistance fits into the broader federal disaster assistance landscape, we take Florida's State Housing Initiatives Partnership (SHIP) program as a case study. The SHIP program can help fill neighborhood-level gaps left by the Federal Emergency Management Agency's (FEMA) Individual Assistance program by aiding neighborhoods with the higher proportions of 1) those who did not receive federal assistance or 2) those who had residual damages not fully covered by federal assistance. The study finds that SHIP funds typically flow into socially vulnerable neighborhoods with a higher proportion of Black and Hispanic residents, even without specific social or racial equity measures built into program regulations. The study highlights the importance of balancing the consistency of fundamental rules and having flexibility in distributing funds.

AI use in Automated Disaster Recovery for IT Applications in Multi Cloud

AI use in Automated Disaster Recovery for IT Applications in Multi Cloud

Strategi Disaster Recovery dengan Virtualisasi: Backup dan Restore Sistem Operasi di VMware dengan Menggunakan Snapshot

A Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) is a structured approach that describes how an organization can carry out its operations after an unplanned incident that can result in system failure. Creating strong system resilience requires an IT team with strong experience and understanding as well, and this is the background of this research. This research aims to provide practical guidance in implementing disaster recovery strategies with virtualization, especially the snapshot feature on VMware Workstation to test disaster scenarios and evaluate their recovery effectiveness.

The role of construction consultants in disaster recovery

Abstract. Disaster recovery requires speed above all, and the public and private sectors need to work together. In the event of a disaster, the activities of the construction industry play a crucial role. Construction consultants, surveying companies, and geological survey companies play an important role. Construction consultants oversee the entire process of disaster recovery, from assessing the damage immediately after the disaster to managing the restoration work. In some cases, local governments order construction management services to supervise the entire disaster recovery work, and in such cases, construction consultants are even responsible for part of placing construction procurements. In this way, construction consultants have become an indispensable part of the disaster recovery process. This report is an introduction to the activities of construction consultants in times of disaster, using the heavy rains situations as examples, and presents of challenges and recommendations.

Toward participatory participation: A community perspective on effective engagement in post-disaster recovery and reconstruction

ABSTRACT Engaging citizens is crucial in disaster recovery efforts, yet its actualization remains elusive. Communities often find themselves relegated to passive recipients, leading to suboptimal reconstruction projects. The primary objective of this study was to explore the community’s perspective regarding optimal processes and outcomes requisite for their meaningful participation, aligning these insights with community development principles. Utilizing qualitative research methodologies such as face-to-face interviews, observations, focus group discussions, and questionnaire surveys the study identified key processes, including equitable stakeholder representation, empowerment in decision-making, integration of indigenous knowledge, early community engagement, and capacity enhancement. These processses are pivital for achieving sustainable development outcomes such as project ownership and successful attainment of project objectives. This research provides critical insights into engaging residents in post-disaster recovery and reconstruction efforts emphasizing the integral role of community development in facilitating inclusive and effective recovery and ensuring projects meet community needs and expectations.

The impact of a disaster recovery policy on health status of the 2015 Gorkha earthquake victims: Evidence from a natural experiment

AbstractThe 2015 Gorkha earthquake destroyed key infrastructure in Greater Kathmandu and the surrounding earthquake‐affected areas, undermining the health status of affected households. As one of the disaster recovery policies, the Nepalese government distributed taxi permits to severely affected households through a lottery. Leveraging on this natural experimental setting, we examine the impact of the policy on their health status and access to health services. The results show that the treated households have fewer chronic and diarrhoeal diseases, and fewer doctor visits. However, we find no significant difference in the households' medical expenditure between the two groups. We also find that rural households with the taxi permits benefit more from the policy. The results of this study may provide policymakers with some insight to enhance their post‐disaster recovery strategy.

A Novel Attention-Based Generalized Efficient Layer Aggregation Network for Landslide Detection from Satellite Data in the Higher Himalayas, Nepal

Landslide event detection poses a significant challenge in the remote sensing community, especially with the advancements in computer vision technology. As computational capabilities continue to grow, the traditional manual and partially automated methods of landslide recognition from remote sensing data are transitioning towards automatic approaches using deep learning algorithms. Moreover, attention models, encouraged by the human visual system, have emerged as crucial modules in diverse applications including natural hazard assessment. Therefore, we suggest a novel and intelligent generalized efficient layer aggregation network (GELAN) based on two prevalent attention modules, efficient channel attention (ECA) and convolutional block attention module (CBAM), to enrich landslide detection techniques from satellite images. CBAM and ECA are separately integrated into GELAN at different locations. The experiments are conducted using satellite images of the Nepal Himalayan region. Standard metrics such as precision, recall, F-score, and mAP (mean average precision) are considered for quantitative evaluation. GELANc+CBAM (F-score = 81.5%) demonstrates the best performance. This study underscores the suitability of the proposed approach in up-to-date inventory creation and accurate landslide mapping for disaster recovery and response efforts. Moreover, it contributes to developing early prediction models for landslide hazards.

Challenges of transdisciplinary approach in disaster recovery management

Challenges of transdisciplinary approach in disaster recovery management

Motion generation for a tracked robot going over an unfixed obstacle on a slope using reinforcement learning

Tracked robots are useful in disaster recovery missions owing to their high traversability. However, even tracked robots find traversing terrains with obstacles such as rocks difficult. Particularly, unfixed obstacles pose problems. Therefore, this study aims to generate motion for tracked robots to go over unfixed obstacles on slopes by utilizing a reinforcement learning (RL) approach. In RL, rewards are important to make robots learn optimal policies for various tasks. Hence, a new definition of going over an unfixed obstacle is proposed. Based on the proposed definition, a sparse reward is designed to motivate the robot to go over the obstacle while avoiding the large sliding-down phenomenon responsible for the failure of going over and the large directional deviation of the robot. In our experiment, a robot is trained in a dynamic simulator and it attempts to go over a spherical unfixed obstacle under various environmental conditions: radius of the obstacle, slope degree, and initial position of the obstacle. We verify that the success rate converges to a high value and the robot successfully generates motions to go over the spherical unfixed obstacle.

Biometric Technology at the Borders of Citizenship: Identifying Technical Standards for Introducer-Based Remote Onboarding in Global Contexts of Statelessness, Nomadism, Displacement, and Refuge

Abstract All throughout the so-called “Global South”, hundreds of millions of individuals from entire communities in the rural, poorer, or most peripheral areas are not officially recorded by the States they are citizens of or they habitually reside in. This is why several of such States are resorting to extensive and purportedly “universal” digital remote onboarding programs, pioneered by India’s Aadhaar, whereby individuals are centrally recorded onto a public database with their identity (and possibly citizenship) confirmed. Whenever paper documents are obsolete, inaccurate, deteriorated, or inexistent, individuals may have their identity confirmed through an “introducer”, who mediates between marginalised communities and central authorities and is entrusted by both with this delicate task. Introducers, however, cannot by themselves grant someone the status as “citizen”: they may at best confirm his or her existence and identity. These onboarding programs are enabled by wide-covering sets of technical standards, ranging from data protection and cybersecurity to interoperability, safety, disaster recovery, and business continuity. Meanwhile, similar technologies, relying on analogous standards, and fundamentally aimed at a similar purpose (that is, registering all those who fall within the prescriptive jurisdiction of a State), are deployed by border officials in the context of migration management – especially in “developed” countries. The “unofficial” and “outside-the-scope-of-the-law” components of said migratory patterns are growing exponentially due to combined effects of climate, insecurity, and geopolitical factors, increasingly originating “borderline” situations whereby identity and citizenship are challenged and contested: statelessness, refuge, nomadism (both traditional and “digital”), and internal displacement. Strikingly enough, discussions around what technical standards to adopt, and who should select them, as well as on what the role of “introducers” could be, towards the digital onboarding of individuals experiencing “borderline” configurations of citizenship are entirely neglected in socio-legal and security scholarship alike. Complemented with concrete policy proposals, the present work accepts the ambition to start bridging this gap.

An Overview of Cloud Computing Systems

Cloud computing has revolutionized IT resource management, providing scalable and flexible internet services that significantly differ from traditional on-premises infrastructure. This paper presents a comprehensive overview of cloud computing systems, examining their architecture, service models, deployment models, and the advantages and challenges they pose. The architecture of cloud computing is foundational, comprising client-side devices, cloud infrastructure backend, and networking components. Service models are categorized into Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS), each offering different levels of abstraction and control. Deployment models include public, private, hybrid, and community clouds, each tailored to specific organizational needs. The advantages of cloud computing, such as cost efficiency, scalability, accessibility, disaster recovery, and innovation, are significant. However, challenges like security and privacy concerns, downtime and reliability issues, compliance requirements, and vendor lock-in necessitate careful planning and management. Understanding these facets is crucial for organizations to effectively leverage cloud computing and navigate its complex landscape.

Addressing complexity and planning for the uncertain: local finances in wartime Ukraine

IMPACT This article explores how local governments adapt their financial management systems during the chaos and uncertainty of war; the authors use the recent military conflict in Ukraine as a case study. This article has lessons for public managers and policy-makers—especially at the local government level. The authors emphasise the importance of aligning state and local financial systems, and the need for flexibility in financial decision-making during periods of high uncertainty. The article also highlights the uneven effects of wars in different local areas, urging policy-makers to ensure that top-level strategies accurately reflect local realities. The insights from this article deepen our understanding of how we should approach disaster recovery, contributing to more effective and resilient responses to future crises.

Trajectories of quality of life among disaster victims: A national longitudinal study.

This study categorized quality-of-life trajectories among disaster victims in South Korea and identified the characteristics and predictors of each trajectory. Disaster victims experience tremendous physical and mental distress, which has a long-term impact on their quality of life. We conducted a cross-sectional study using data obtained from the fourth Long-term Survey on the Change of Life of Disaster Victims conducted from 2017 to 2019. The study included 257 participants who experienced a typhoon, earthquake, or fire and completed the three-year follow-up. Latent transition analysis was used to identify the potential class of quality-of-life trajectories among disaster victims. Independent t tests, χ2 tests, and logistic regression were used to identify the predictors of quality-of-life trajectories. Two latent quality-of-life classes were identified: persistent low-level and persistent high-level. Factors associated with the persistent high-level trajectory included higher education level, no injury/disease from the disaster, better subjective health status, higher social support, and lower social maladjustment. Quality of life early after a disaster is maintained throughout subsequent years; early and active support following disasters is essential to promote its rapid improvement. Targeted educational programs in disaster-prone areas are recommended to bolster resilience among individuals with lower education. Moreover, governmental and institutional efforts are needed to support victims who lack resources for disaster recovery. There is a need to establish community-based social support systems and enhance nurses' disaster response capabilities to support vulnerable groups, with such interventions tailored to reflect disaster-affected victims' unique characteristics and needs, along with ongoing research and evaluation for continuous improvements to nursing practice and disaster response.

Assessing “Invisible Loss” During Medium-Term Earthquake Recovery: The Case of Indonesia's 2016 Aceh Earthquakes

This study presents the results of a medium-term assessment of earthquake recovery, aiming to measure non-economic welfare losses resulting from the indirect impacts of earthquakes. While most earthquake assessments concentrate on the economic loss and damage caused by direct impacts of earthquakes, this study focuses on capturing these less visible non-economic losses. The 2016 Aceh earthquakes in Indonesia serve as the case study for this assessment. By applying the difference-in-differences method, we compared the changes in a range of non-economic welfare indicators in earthquake-affected and unaffected villages two years before (2014) and two years after (2018) the catastrophic earthquakes. In addition to administrative data, we tested the suitability of average monthly and annual night-time light data from the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) instrument as an alternative way to capture non-economic welfare losses. The findings from administrative data suggested a significant deterioration in, poverty, access to healthcare and access to socio-economic services in earthquake-affected villages relative to unaffected villages in 2018, compared to 2014. The analysis of nightlights data revealed contrasting results, suggesting that disaster recovery assessments using nightlights may not accurately capture non-economic welfare changes on the ground. Our research indicates that the detrimental effects of earthquakes on non-economic welfare persisted for years following the initial devastation. Utilizing administrative data can help pinpoint the nature and extent of non-economic losses and inform the development of policies to aid in the effective recovery of affected communities.

Efficient and robust disaster recovery system using cloud-based algorithms with data integrity

Incorporating cloud-based algorithms for disaster recovery (DR), it explores data replication, failover, virtual machine (VM) migration, and consistency algorithms. These algorithms play a pivotal role in safeguarding data and system continuity during unforeseen disruptions. Data replication ensures redundancy, failover algorithms swiftly transition to backup resources, VM migration facilitates resource optimization, and consistency algorithms maintain data integrity. Leveraging cloud technology enhances the effectiveness of these algorithms, providing robust DR solutions critical for business continuity in today's digital landscape. The recent growth in popularity of internet services on a massive scale has also raised the demand for stable underpinnings. Despite the fact that DR for big data is frequently overlooked in security research, the majority of existing approaches use a narrow, endpoint-centric approach. The significance of DR strategies has grown as cloud storage has become the norm for more data. But traditional cloud-centric DR techniques may be expensive, thus less expensive alternatives are being sought. There is persistent concern in the information technology (IT) community about whether or not cloud service providers (CPs) can guarantee data and service continuity in the event of a disaster.

Exploring AWS S3: In-Depth Analysis of Bucket Management

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) is a cornerstone in modern data management strategies with in Amazon Web Services (AWS). It is pivotal in providing scalable, durable, and accessible object storage infrastructure. A key advantage of S3 is its scalability, enabling seamless storage capacity expansion without upfront investments or provisioning delays. This flexibility empowers organizations to accommodate dynamic data growth while maintaining operational agility, which is crucial in today's rapidly evolving digital landscape. S3's exceptional durability, boasting an impressive 99.999999999% reliability, ensures steadfast data integrity and resilience against potential failures, mitigating concerns about data loss and bolstering confidence in managing mission-critical information effectively. Accessibility is another crucial aspect, with robust access controls and APIs facilitating secure data retrieval, storage, and management from any location. This accessibility fosters collaboration and innovation by enabling seamless data interaction and utilization across geographical boundaries.S3's integration capabilities with other AWS services enhance operational efficiency and optimize data analytics workflows. It is a foundational element in data analytics, facilitating data ingestion, storage, and processing to derive actionable insights from diverse datasets. Furthermore, S3's versatility extends beyond storage, supporting applications such as content delivery, backup and archiving, disaster recovery, and machine learning model training. This versatility drives innovation across industries and underscores S3's role in driving digital transformation and fostering a culture rooted in data-driven decision-making. In conclusion, Amazon S3's unparalleled scalability, durability, and accessibility make it indispensable for organizations navigating the data-centric landscape of modern business environments, underlining the imperative of harnessing its full potential for organizational success.

Partisipasi Masyarakat Dalam Manajemen Rehabilitasi dan Rekonstruksi Pasca Bencana Tsunami Tahun 2018 di Kabupaten Pandeglang

Participation from all parties is important in post-disaster rehabilitation and reconstruction because it is the most complex activity in disaster management from the planning process, funding, and implementation. A Tsunami that struck Sunda strait in December 2018 caused a great loss and immediate response is necessary. The delay of rehabilitation and reconstructions affected the stability of national security. Therefore, all parties need to take part in post-tsunami recovery so that the disaster recovery process implemented effectively and efficiently. The purpose of this study was to analyze the participation of society in the post-tsunami rehabilitation and reconstruction management in Pandeglang district, coordination networking, and contributions to national security. The qualitative method is used in this research from the primary and secondary databases. For the purposes of this study, the primary data were gathered through face-to-face interviews from the subjects of research who were chosen based on purposive sampling and snowball methods. The data analyzed qualitatively and simulation by UCINET 6 is used for coordination networking. The result shows that all parties had taken part in the Pandeglang post-tsunami recovery management from the planning process, implementation, monitoring, and evaluations. The level and form of community participation are diverse.

Untangling the relationship between power outage and population activity recovery in disasters

Despite recognition of the relationship between infrastructure resilience and community recovery, very limited empirical evidence exists regarding the extent to which the disruptions in and restoration of infrastructure services contribute to the speed of community recovery. To address this gap, this study investigates the relationship between community and infrastructure systems in the context of hurricane impacts, focusing on the recovery dynamics of population activity and power infrastructure restoration. Empirical observational data were utilized to analyze the extent of impact, recovery duration, and recovery types of both systems in the aftermath of Hurricane Ida. The study reveals three key findings. First, power outage duration positively correlates with outage extent until a certain impact threshold is reached. Beyond this threshold, restoration time remains relatively stable regardless of outage magnitude. This finding underscores the need to strengthen power infrastructure, particularly in extreme weather conditions, to minimize outage restoration time. Second, power was fully restored in 70% of affected areas before population activity levels normalized. This finding suggests the role infrastructure functionality plays in post-disaster community recovery. Quicker power restoration did not equate to rapid population activity recovery due to other possible factors such as transportation, housing damage, and business interruptions. Finally, if power outages last beyond two weeks, community activity resumes before complete power restoration, indicating adaptability in prolonged outage scenarios. This implies the capacity of communities to adapt to ongoing power outages and continue daily life activities. These findings offer valuable empirical insights into the interaction between human activities and infrastructure systems, such as power outages, during extreme weather events. They also enhance our empirical understanding of how infrastructure resilience influences community recovery. By identifying the critical thresholds for power outage functionality and duration that affect population activity recovery, this study furthers our understanding of how infrastructure performance intertwines with community functioning in extreme weather conditions. Hence, the findings can inform infrastructure operators, emergency managers, and public officials about the significance of resilient infrastructure in life activity recovery of communities when facing extreme weather hazards.