Disaster Response Information Research Articles

Designing and Developing Dynamic Decision Support Information for Disaster Response

Designing and Developing Dynamic Decision Support Information for Disaster Response

Remote sensing‐based mapping of structural building damage in the Ahr valley

AbstractFlood damage data are needed for various applications. Structural damage of buildings can reflect not only the economic damage but also the life‐threatening condition of a building, which provide crucial information for disaster response and recovery. Since traditional on‐site data collection shortly after a disaster is challenging, remote sensing data can be of great help, cover a wider area and be deployed earlier in time than on‐site surveys. However, this has its challenges and limitations. We elucidate on that by presenting two case studies from flash floods in Germany. First, we assessed the reliability of an existing flood damage schema, which differentiates from minor (structural) damage to complete building collapse. We compared two on‐site raters of the 2016 Braunsbach flood, reaching an excellent level of reliability. Second, we mapped structural building damage after the flood in the Ahr valley in 2021 using a textured 3D mesh and orthophotos. Here, we evaluated the remote sense‐based damage mapping done by three raters. Although the heterogeneity of ratings using remote sensing data is larger than among on‐site ratings, we consider it fit‐for‐purpose when compared with on‐site mapping, especially for event documentation and as basis for financial damage estimation and less complex numerical modelling.

Impact of Media Information on Social Response in Disasters: A Case Study of the Freezing-Rain and Snowstorm Disasters in Southern China in 2008

Disaster information content is an objective mapping of disaster situations, social response, and public opinions. Social response to emergency is an important mechanism for implementing and guaranteeing emergency management of major natural hazard-related disasters. Understanding how disaster information content affects social response to emergencies is helpful for managing risk communication and efficient disaster response. Based on the 2008 freezing-rain and snowstorm disasters in southern China, this study used Python to extract 7,857 case-related media reports and applied natural language processing for text analysis. It used three typical cases to identify and analyze disaster media report content and the relationship between these reports and the social response to the emergency. Eight categories of disaster response—such as prewarning and forecasting, announcements by the authorities, and social mobilization—appeared in the disaster information in the media, along with disaster impact information, that is, real-time disaster status. Disaster response information and an appropriate amount of disaster impact information played important roles in prewarning, disaster relief, public opinion guidance, and social stability maintenance and can serve important functions in communicating with all stakeholders of emergency management, assisting or influencing emergency departments or individuals in decision making, and eliminating “information islands.” Empathy caused the general public to become “disaster responders” through receiving information. Rumors and an excess of negative information may have a perverse amplification effect on public opinion and increase the unpredictability of the disaster situation and the risk of social crisis.

Chemical explosion, COVID-19, and environmental justice: Insights from low-cost air quality sensors

ObjectivesTo examine the impact of the Intercontinental Terminals Company (ITC) fire and COVID-19 on airborne particulate matter (PM) concentrations and the PM disproportionally affecting communities in Houston using low-cost sensors. MethodsWe compared measurements from a network of low-cost sensors with a separate network of monitors from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in the Houston metropolitan area from Mar 18, 2019, to Dec 31, 2020. Further, we examined the associations between neighborhood-level sociodemographic status and air pollution patterns by linking the low-cost sensor data to EPA environmental justice screening and mapping systems. FindingsWe found increased PM levels during ITC fire and pre-COVID-19, and lower PM levels after the COVID-19 lockdown, comparable to observations from the regulatory monitors, with higher variations and a greater number of locations with high PM levels detected. In addition, the environmental justice analysis showed positive associations between higher PM levels and the percentage of minority, low-income population, and demographic index. ImplicationOur study indicates that low-cost sensors provide pollutant measures with higher spatial variations and a better ability to identify hot spots and high peak concentrations. These advantages provide critical information for disaster response and environmental justice studies. SynopsisWe used measurements from a low-cost sensor network for air pollution monitoring and environmental justice analysis to examine the impact of anthropogenic and natural disasters.

Sosial Media Analisis Berbasis NLP Untuk Mempercepat Tanggap Bencana Banjir

Flood disasters that are monitored in real-time on social media can be seen to report directly the condition of the affected areas. Areas that have been warned to be affected by the floods were informed via social media. Surrounding areas that are likely to be affected can be more vigilant by directly speeding up information and getting responses from social media users who are around flood-prone areas. The research aims to provide visualization models that can accelerate flood response information from disaster management, track disasters with increasing vigilance, and accelerate flood disaster recovery with analysis on social media. The approach used with Natural Language Processing (NLP), a data source derived from posts on Instagram is taken for analytical materials. Data sources from Instagram with flood hashtags in Kalimantan are used by using the Natural Language Processing (NLP) process stage to get core information visualizations to speed up flood response information. Visualization of social media data information used based on extracting information from Instagram posts, responses, and hashtags to speed up information provides troubleshooting and the importance of speeding up flood response information. The results of data visualization can accelerate disaster response information to increase awareness of the condition of the surrounding area that can be affected by floods, it can be seen that the amount of data on the hashtag provides data visualization information in accelerating flood disaster management from disaster tracking to disaster recovery.

A Disaster Situation Management Study using MORT-TAC

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to present a plan to manage disaster situations using MORT-TAC, a factor to consider the situation evaluation of disaster sites. Despite the importance of disaster response due to the sharing of initial disaster information in disaster response, small disasters often develop into national disasters due to the lack of important information in the event of a disaster. Method: In order to conduct research using MORT-TAC, a factor in evaluating disaster situations, various organizations can use MORT-TAC to distribute initial disaster information through literature research and telephone interviews due to COVID-19. In addition, a study was conducted to incorporate the researcher s military expertise for 30 years of military service into the disaster field. Results: As a result of the district, MORT-TAC was suggested to distribute initial information on disaster sites between city and county emergency control teams, integrated support headquarters, regional and central emer-gency control teams, and education and training programs to improve disaster-related officials expertise. Conclusion: Disaster response and disaster situation management must be performed by professional officials. Disaster officials of all disaster response emergency organizations must have the expertise to manage disaster situations using MORT-TAC, and to this end, education and training programs must be reflected in the annual education plan. In addition, in-depth research on MORT-TAC should be continuously studied in the future.

Robustness of Stakeholder Response Networks for Infrastructure System Protection

During disasters, maintaining the functionality of infrastructure systems requires effective and efficient stakeholder collaboration. Aiming at understanding stakeholder collaboration robustness in response to infrastructure interruptions, this research proposes a network-based approach that comprises two steps: (1) generating response networks through network analysis; and (2) indicating time evolution of stakeholder collaboration robustness through a measure of topological network robustness. A case study, which examines stakeholder collaboration on protecting transportation infrastructure in Texas during Hurricane Harvey, was conducted to demonstrate the feasibility and validity of the proposed approach. From the case study, several social processes were identified to facilitate decision making in future disaster response. In addition, the case study implies that the documentation and sharing of disaster response information at the local level require further improvements. Overall, this research promotes interorganizational collaboration in emergency management through creating a systematic, network-based approach for quantitatively analyzing time evolution of stakeholder collaboration robustness. The findings provide implementable support for stakeholders to advance their collaboration knowledge, thereby enhancing the overall response performance.

Deep learning-based aerial image segmentation with open data for disaster impact assessment

Satellite images are an extremely valuable resource in the aftermath of natural disasters such as hurricanes and tsunamis where they can be used for risk assessment and disaster management. In order to provide timely and actionable information for disaster response, a framework utilising segmentation neural networks is proposed to identify impacted areas and accessible roads in post-disaster scenarios. The effectiveness of pretraining with ImageNet -for the task of aerial image segmentation has been analysed and performances of popular segmentation models compared. Experimental results show that pretraining on ImageNet usually improves the segmentation performance for a number of models. Open data available from OpenStreetMap (OSM) is used for training, forgoing the need for time-consuming manual annotation. The method also makes use of graph theory to update road network data available from OSM and to detect the changes caused by a natural disaster. Extensive experiments on data from the 2018 tsunami that struck Palu, Indonesia show the effectiveness of the proposed framework. ENetSeparable, with 30% fewer parameters compared to ENet, achieved comparable segmentation results to that of the state-of-the-art networks.

Synergistic Integration of Detailed Meteorological and Community Information for Evacuation from Weather-Related Disasters: Proposal of a \u201cDisaster Response Switch\u201d

Meteorological information used for disaster prevention has developed rapidly in terms of both type and specificity. The latest forecasting models can predict weather with very high resolutions that can characterize disaster risk at the local level. However, this development can lead to an overdependency on the information and a wait-and-see attitude by the public. At the same time, residents share and use various types of information for disaster response, such as local conditions, in addition to official disaster information. Our research in Japan verified the practicality and efficiency of synergistically integrating these types of information by examining actual evacuation cases. The current numerical forecasting models sufficiently identify locality from the viewpoint of various administrative scales such as prefectures, municipalities, and school districts, but the improvements to these models have failed to improve residents’ judgment in successful evacuation cases. We therefore analyzed the relationship between meteorological information and residents’ disaster response and confirmed that they were strongly correlated and were contributing factors in preventing disasters. We revealed differences between a community’s disaster prevention culture and the disaster information provided. This led us to propose a new concept in community disaster prevention that we call the “disaster response switch,” which can serve as a data-driven risk management tool for communities when used in combination with advanced meteorological disaster information.

REFUGEE BASED DATA COLLECTION IN DISASTER RESPONSE

<p>Indonesia's high disaster risk requires an information system that can improve effectiveness in disaster response. Therefore, there is a need for an application that could be a means for various information in disaster response in Indonesia. This research uses the Development Life Cycles or SDLC Software, specified with the Waterfall Model. This model has 4 phases, as following: requirement analysis, system analysis, implementation, verification, and maintenance. From this research, a victim-based data collection application can collect data at the disaster site regularly. It also can replace the previous conventional methods so that it can facilitate the National Disaster Management Authority (BNPB) in carrying out information to the community. The results of this study are the prototype of data collection applications in helping disaster response.</p>

An ontology for sharing and managing information in disaster response: An illustrative case study of flood evacuation

AbstractInformation management and sharing is an essential ingredient, but a difficult and challenging problem for disaster response management. This paper proposes an ontology as a model to organize and structure information in order to improve the information management and sharing in disaster response management. The ontology was designed and developed based on philosophically grounded foundational ontologies. It was also implemented in ontological languages and demonstrated and evaluated in a case study of the flood evacuation process. This paper also provides a systematic approach to develop a well-founded domain ontology that addresses both static and dynamic aspects of a given domain.

An Ontology for Sharing and Managing Information in Disaster Response: In Flood Response Usage Scenarios

Information management and sharing is an essential ingredient, but a difficult and challenging problem for disaster response management due to the large number of heterogeneous concepts used in different organizations. To solve this problem, the number of those heterogeneous concepts has to be reduced. This paper proposes an ontology as a solution to reduce the large number of concepts by understanding only on necessary ontological concepts needed in communication via speech act between the organizations. This is a new approach where the ontology provides a conceptual representation of the disaster response domain from the perspective of communication between the organizations involved. More specifically, the ontology was designed and developed by using the concept of interlocking institutional worlds, in which speech act theory is used as a foundation to present interactions among the organizations, and by using philosophically grounded foundational ontologies. To make this whole approach work, we show an important demonstration of the utility of our proposed work, which is in the expatiation quadrant of the Design Science Research methodology on designing our domain ontology for disaster response management.

When information becomes action: drivers of individuals' trust in broadcast versus peer-to-peer information in disaster response.

Information and communications technology (ICT), primarily mobile telephones and social media, is increasingly important in crisis and disaster response in developing countries. This fact raises an important question: in an information environment that includes traditional media such as radio and television, who are the people that trust information from ICT enough to act on it during a disaster? Drawing on a case study of and original survey data from the island nation of the Independent State of Samoa, this paper yields insights into who uses new technologies, particularly mobile telephones, to make decisions at the local level during crises such as natural disasters, as well as the socio-political factors that motivate their behaviour. The results add to the growing pool of knowledge on utilisation of ICT and new technologies in developing countries for disaster response, and provide practical information on the social and political factors that lead people to trust different information sources and media.

The Standardized Disaster-Information Products for Disaster Management: Concept and Formulation

The purpose of this paper is to consider the essential concept by which to formulate standardized information that supports effective disaster response. From the experiences of past disasters, we have learned that disaster response organizations could not work effectively without information sharing. In the context of disaster response, the purpose of “information sharing” is to ensure common recognition of the disaster situation being confronted. During the Kumamoto earthquake, we provided a set of disaster information products to disaster response organizations to support their relief activities. Based on the real disaster response experience, we extracted issues of information sharing between various organizations. To resolve these issues, we discuss the concept of information sharing first, and then consider the quality of information that supports disaster response activities by referring to the information needs of emergency support organizations such as the Disaster Medical Assistance Team (DMAT). We also analyze the Basic Disaster Management Plan published by the Central Disaster Management Council and extract a common disaster-information set for governmental organizations. As a result, we define the “Standard Disaster-information Set” (SDS) that covers most disaster response information needs. Based on the SDS, we formulate intermediate information products for disaster response that provide consistent information of best-effort quality, named the “Standardized Disaster-information Products” (SDIP). By utilizing the SDIP, disaster response organizations are able to consolidate the common recognition of disaster situations without consideration of data availability, update timing, reliability, and so on.

Psychiatrists Respond After Deadly Protests in Charlottesville

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Professional NewsFull AccessPsychiatrists Respond After Deadly Protests in CharlottesvilleAaron LevinAaron LevinSearch for more papers by this authorPublished Online:12 Sep 2017https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.pn.2017.9b7AbstractMembers of the University of Virginia’s psychiatry department helped care for the caregivers throughout the medical center.The white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va., on Saturday, August 13, escalated from intimidation to outright violence when a participant drove his car into a crowd of counterprotestors, injuring over 30 people and killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer. Before the rally had started, members of the University of Virginia’s (UVA) Department of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Science had joined with others in the hospital to prepare for potential injuries, said Anita Clayton, M.D., a professor and department chair. When possible, patients were discharged early to free up bed space. However, once the incident was under way, the university locked down the campus and access in or out of the medical center became more difficult, even as it was needed most.The university’s psychiatry department then went to work to help colleagues throughout the hospital, said Clayton. “We provided care in the emergency department, the hospital, and on the psychiatry unit through the weekend.”They held town-hall style meetings with medical residents and School of Medicine faculty. Many expressed their fears over the weekend events and their dismay over negative Internet comments about the city and the university. Many were shocked that such an event could occur in such a progressive-minded community. Among the 30 injured were a psychiatry department staff member and her daughter, said Clayton.“We talked with psychiatry residents by class year because they already felt a sense of kinship with each other,” said Clayton. Some talked about how the white nationalist demonstrators had come into their churches to intimidate members. Black and Jewish staff members expressed particular fears, given the presence of the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis among the demonstrators.“We told them how we supported them and that we would not tolerate discrimination,” she said.Members of the psychiatry department also helped out across the university’s medical community, said Amit Shahane, Ph.D., an assistant professor of psychiatry and neurobehavioral science and director of the Behavioral Medical Center.“We met separately with surgery faculty and residents to help them process their experiences after they cared for the injured,” said Shahane in an interview. “There was a general tension between our responsibility as providers to care for everyone and having to deal with people we didn’t agree with in an intense way. Overall, I think our health care system responded in an effective way to a horrific situation.”Zachariah Dameron, M.D., an associate professor of psychiatric medicine and residency program director at UVA, connected by email with his former colleague, Edward Kantor, M.D., now an associate professor and director of resident training at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston. Kantor, formerly on the UVA faculty, serves on APA’s Committee on the Psychiatric Dimensions of Disasters and was involved in the responses to both the Virginia Tech and Charleston church mass shooting events.Kantor suggested to Dameron that the department could help the university and the broader Charlottesville community by focusing on how to mitigate the effects of the immediate crisis and also start thinking about what to do the next time one occurred.Charlottesville’s experience also is another reminder that disasters and tragedies can happen anywhere. Advance preparation and coordination with the rest of the emergency response system can help communities and psychiatrists better prepare for them, said Kantor. In Charleston before the June 2015 shooting, the mental health community was already working with the sheriff, the state’s attorney, community mental health centers, and others. Knowledge of each group’s role and expertise and expectations derived from pre-planning and past response informed the response there. Getting psychiatry staff involved in preplanning for a disaster and developing specific roles can make responses more effective.Meantime, Clayton is also taking a deeper look into the future for her community and her university.“We’ll be dealing with this for a long time,” said Clayton. “It’s not easy to get over. You can’t be silent, and you can’t be passive. As a university community, we have a chance to stand together more and stand up for our values, the values of diversity, equality, and inclusiveness.” ■Disaster response information and resources are posted on APA’s website. ISSUES NewArchived

Tweeting after an earthquake: user localization and communication patterns during the 2012 Emilia seismic sequence

The main goal of this paper is analysing how user’s location, relative to the epicenter of an earthquake, affects the different tweeting strategies adopted. For this purpose, we analyze a dataset of tweets that were generated around the 2012 Emilia earthquakes and that are geolocalized in Italy. In our analysis, we rely on existing literature on social media and natural disasters, considering literature exploring interactions and influence on Twitter, and literature focusing on the role of geolocalized user-generated information in disaster response.

Modeling Civic Networks for Innovative Design of a Disaster Response System: A Proposed Framework

Despite comprehensive disaster management mechanisms, civic networks for vulnerable community for disaster remain little understood. Recent episodes of flood and landslide disasters have increased the need to deepen our understanding on the role of civic networks for disaster response system. This study proposes an empirical response to recent calls for civic networks in mediating disaster response systems qualities, so as to deepen nuanced understanding on its social capital perspective. Specifically, norms, networks and social trust are hypothesized to mediate three disaster response information system dimensions: knowledge quality, service quality, and situational quality as predictors of individual’s ability to use the system effectively for disaster response. In this context, pertinent civic networks literatures for disaster were examined to suggest individual’s impact of disaster response system as mediated by civic networks precursors: norms, networks and social trust.

Understanding the Mapping Sequence of Online Volunteers in Disaster Response

GIScience 2016 Short Paper Proceedings Understanding the Mapping Sequence of Online Volunteers in Disaster Response Yingjie Hu and Krzysztof Janowicz {yingjiehu,jano}@geog.ucsb.edu STKO Lab, Department of Geography, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA Abstract In recent years, online volunteers have been actively participating in disaster response, thanks to the advancement of information technologies and the support from humanitarian organizations. One important way in which online volunteers contribute to disaster response is by mapping the a↵ected area based on remote sensing imagery. Such online mapping generates up-to-date geographic informa- tion which can provide valuable support for the decision making of emergency responders. Typically, the area a↵ected by an disaster is divided into a number of cells using a grid-based tessellation and each volunteer can select one cell to start the mapping. While this approach coordinates the e↵orts from many online volunteers, it is unclear in which sequence these grid cells have been mapped. This sequence is important because it determines when the geographic information within a particular cell will become available to emergency responders, which in turn can directly influence the efficiency of rescue tasks and other relief e↵orts. In this work, we study three online mapping projects which were deployed and utilized in 2015 Nepal, 2016 Ecuador, and 2016 Japan earthquakes to gain insights into the mapping sequences performed by online volunteers. Keywords: Disaster response, crisis mapping, volunteered geographic information Introduction In recent years, online volunteers have been actively involved in disaster response. On the one side, infor- mation and communication technologies allow volunteers to contribute to disaster relief without having to be physically present at the a↵ected areas. On the other side, humanitarian communities, such as Standby Task Force (Meier, 2012a) and Crisis Mapper (Shanley et al., 2013), play an important role in bringing together online volunteers and coordinating their e↵orts. With the support from technologies and hu- manitarian organizations, volunteers have made important contributions to 2010 Haiti earthquake (Zook et al., 2010), 2012 Hurricane Sandy in the U.S. (Meier, 2012b), 2013 Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines (Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, 2013), and the 2015 Nepal Earthquake (Hu and Janowicz, 2015). One important way in which volunteers contribute to disaster response is by mapping the a↵ected areas based on remote sensing images. During the online mapping process, volunteers digitize geographic features which may be missing from the previous maps, as well as update the existing geographic data to reflect the current status (e.g., a road may be blocked after an earthquake). This process generates up- to-date geographic information which can provide valuable support for the decision making of emergency responders. While these volunteer-contributed data may not be of highest quality, they generally satisfy the needs of disaster response (Goodchild and Glennon, 2010). Since many volunteers may be participating in online mapping at the same time, humanitarian orga- nizations often divide the a↵ected area into cells using a grid-based tessellation. Each online volunteer can then select a grid cell to start the mapping task. While this approach helps avoid editing conflicts and duplications, there is a lack of understanding on the sequence in which online volunteers map the grid cells. Such a sequence is important because it directly determines the time when the geographic information within a particular cell will become available. From our observation, the mapping time di↵er- ence between two neighboring grid cells can be 4 days and sometimes even longer. In disaster response, the first 72 hours after a disaster have been widely considered as the critical period for rescue tasks. After this period, the survival rate drops dramatically (Fiedrich et al., 2000; Comfort et al., 2004; Ochoa and Santos, 2015). Thus, if the grid cells that contain the critical information for disaster response are mapped first, more people can be potentially saved. Intuitively, selecting cells at random is not an ideal solution, since population, transportation infrastructure, and potential rescue routes should be taken into account.

Prioritisation of citizen-centric information for disaster response.

In the aftermath of a disaster event, and in the absence of trained professionals, many responsibilities are assumed by uninjured citizens who are willing and able to help, such as care of the injured or search and rescue. These citizens are constrained by communications and logistics problems but are less equipped to deal with them as most often they are cut off from any coordinated assistance. The method proposed in this study would increase the survivability of those injured or trapped by a disaster event by providing a facility to allow citizens to coordinate and share information among themselves. This is facilitated by the proposed deployment and the autonomous management of an ad hoc infrastructure that liaises directly with survivors without central control. Furthermore, as energy concerns present critical constraints to these networks, this research proposes a system of categorising information elements within the network to ensure efficient information exchange.

Near-Real-Time Analysis of Publicly Communicated Disaster Response Information

Analysis of a disaster event can identify strengths and weaknesses of the response implemented by the disaster management system; however, analysis does not typically occur until after the response phase is over. The result is that knowledge gained can only benefit future responses rather than the response under investigation. This article argues that there is an opportunity to conduct analysis while the response is operational due to the increasing availability of information within hours and days of a disaster event. Hence, this article introduces a methodology for analyzing publicly communicated disaster response information in near-real-time. A classification scheme for the disaster information needs of the public has been developed to facilitate analysis and has led to the establishment of best observed practice standards for content and timeliness. By comparing the information shared with the public within days of a disaster to these standards, information gaps are revealed that can be investigated further. The result is identification of potential deficiencies in communicating critical disaster response information to the public at a time when they can still be corrected.