Flood Crisis Research Articles

Australian medical response to a rural Pakistan town following the flood crisis of 2010

Following the devastating floods affecting Pakistan in 2010 an Australian Medical Task Force comprising of civilian and military members was deployed to the Pakistani town of Kot Addu to assist with the overwhelmed local health care facilities. Civilian doctors, nurses and paramedics were drawn from across Australia to participate in the mission. Support staff included Australian scientists trained in microbiology. The clinic and a basic laboratory facility were constructed on a sports field using inflatable tent structures. Over 11 000 consultations were completed during the 48 days that the clinic operated. Common conditions encountered included malaria, malnutrition, tuberculosis and diarrhoeal illness. The skills contributed by microbiologist staff allowed for rapid and definitive diagnosis being provided to patients attending the clinic. The laboratory confirmed diagnoses from deployment were provided to the local health ministry and World Health Organization (WHO) on a daily basis. Eighteen months on, the basic accommodation, nutritional and economic needs of the population need ongoing attention.

An object-based approach for flood area delineation in a transboundary area using ENVISAT ASAR and LANDSAT TM data

The aim of this study was to develop a straightforward approach for flood area mapping in a transboundary riverbed using Geographic Object-Based Image Analysis. Weak bilateral/multilateral cooperation among neighboring countries hampers effective disaster management and mitigation activities over transboundary areas and strengthens the demand for reliable remote-sensing-derived information. Three object-based classification approaches using ENVISAT/ASAR and multi-temporal LANDSAT TM data were developed and validated for flood area delineation. The accuracy assessment of the classification results was based on oblique air photo interpretation and an area-based comparison with the official flood map. The bi-level object-based model using the Normalized Difference Water Index and the original post-flood TM bands attained 92.67% overall accuracy in inundated-areas detection, while the ENVISAT/ASAR classification was the least accurate (85.33%), probably due to the lower spatial resolution of the Synthetic Aperture Radar image. A strong agreement (92.14%) was found between the LANDSAT flood extent and the official flood map, suggesting that the proposed method has the potential to be employed in the future as a standard part of a flood crisis management process.

Facilitating ‘storied relationships to a place’: The capacity of the university to lead communities towards resilience through creative arts activities

This article reports on the leadership aspects of the community creative arts based Resurfacing Stronger project, which was mounted in response to the recent flood crisis in Queensland, Australia, and involved the participation of a regional university. The project combines creative writing workshops and the publication of community writing with a study of contemporary community writing in Central Queensland. These various components are focused on gaining an understanding of the social dimensions of flood preparedness and response through creative writing as both action and product, as well as conducting a pilot study of contemporary community writing in the Central Queensland region. This article demonstrates the capacity of the university to lead communities towards resilience through creative arts activities, in this case, through leading community members in writing narratives of their individual relationships to localised places in times of crisis—what nature writer Barry Lopez has referred to as ‘storied relationship[s] to a place’ (1997).

Mother's body mass index as a predictor of infant's nutritional status in the post-emergency phase of a flood

Maternal nutritional status is a determinant of child health. This paper studies the association between a mother's body mass index (BMI) and her infant's nutritional status over a one year time frame after the 1998 flood crisis in Bangladesh. The paper uses secondary analysis of data collected from 757 households in seven rural areas of Bangladesh affected by the 1998 flood using multiple-stage probability sampling techniques (n = 143). Logistic regression models were employed to investigate the predictive impact of maternal BMI on infant's nutritional status after controlling for a range of child and maternal factors. An underweight mother was a significant factor with regard to the risk of infants suffering stunting (odds ratio (OR) = 4.45, 95 per cent confidence interval (CI) = 1.04-18.94) and being underweight (OR = 3.51, 95 per cent CI = 1.02-12.05) a year later, but not wasting (OR = 2.09, 95 per cent CI = 0.51-8.67). The findings suggest that there is a post-emergency link between maternal and infant nutritional health.

Mother's body mass index as a predictor of infant's nutritional status in the post‐emergency phase of a flood

Maternal nutritional status is a determinant of child health. This paper studies the association between a mother's body mass index (BMI) and her infant's nutritional status over a one year time frame after the 1998 flood crisis in Bangladesh. The paper uses secondary analysis of data collected from 757 households in seven rural areas of Bangladesh affected by the 1998 flood using multiple‐stage probability sampling techniques (n = 143). Logistic regression models were employed to investigate the predictive impact of maternal BMI on infant's nutritional status after controlling for a range of child and maternal factors. An underweight mother was a significant factor with regard to the risk of infants suffering stunting (odds ratio (OR) = 4.45, 95 per cent confidence interval (CI) = 1.04–18.94) and being underweight (OR = 3.51, 95 per cent CI = 1.02–12.05) a year later, but not wasting (OR = 2.09, 95 per cent CI = 0.51–8.67). The findings suggest that there is a post‐emergency link between maternal and infant nutritional health.

Grid Technology Reliability for Flash Flood Forecasting: End-user Assessment

The flash flood forecasting is one of the most important challenges for research in hydrology. The anticipation of extreme hydrological scenarios through rainfall–runoff models is still limited, mainly because of the high uncertainty of rainfall forecasts, as of limited computing resources. The authors propose to simulate an ensemble of potential hydrological scenarios in order to support the forecaster’s decision-making process. The developed applicative layer takes advantage of the computing capabilities of Grid technology, significantly enhancing the management of independent modelling operations in an operational lead time. A set of experimentations is deployed in order to firstly assess efficiency of this applicative layer and secondly to gauge more broadly the potentialities of Grid to handle flood crisis management operations. Finally, in managing more than one hundred hydrological simulations simultaneously, this experimental platform opens new perspectives for the improvement of hydrological forecast modelling, limited up to now by the lack of computing resources.

TOWARDS A GRID SERVICES BASED FRAMEWORK FOR THE VIRTUALIZATION, EXECUTION AND COMPOSITION OF MPI APPLICATIONS

We present Quantify, a programming framework for exposing high-performance parallel MPI applications using Grid Services. The two distinctive programming styles of Grid Services and MPI are bridged using a data-centric virtualization approach through the notion of Uses and Provides Quantities. Quantities are used to describe an abstract application interface, permit data exchange between applications and facilitate the composition of two or more applications in a service workflow. Uses and Provides Quantities are modelled using Service Data Elements (SDEs). Finally we demonstrate the applicability of the framework using a Flood Crisis application scenario.

The CrossGrid project

Abstract There are many large-scale problems that require new approaches to computing, such as earth observation, environmental management, biomedicine, industrial and scientific modeling. The CrossGrid project addresses realistic problems in medicine, environmental protection, flood prediction, and physics analysis and is oriented towards specific end-users: Medical doctors, who could obtain new tools to help them to obtain correct diagnoses and to guide them during operations; industries, that could be advised on the best timing for some critical operations involving risk of pollution; flood crisis teams, that could predict the risk of a flood on the basis of historical records and actual hydrological and meteorological data; physicists, who could optimize the analysis of massive volumes of data distributed across countries and continents. Corresponding applications will be based on Grid technology and could be complex and difficult to use: the CrossGrid project aims at developing several tools that will make the Grid more friendly for average users. Portals for specific applications will be designed, that should allow for easy connection to the Grid, create a customized work environment, and provide users with all necessary information to get their job done.

Disastrous Rites: Liminality and Communitas in a Flood Crisis

A sense of communitas, well noted by social scientists, occurs in human societies during times of natural disaster. Using the Red River Valley Flood of 1997 as a case example, it is found that disaster communitas has similarities to ritual communitas specifically because people consciously ritualize and mythologize their actions during disaster. While this sacralization of practical action serves to optimize disaster response, it also creates an expanded sense of self, community, and purpose that can leave many survivors of disaster with a sense that they have undergone a profoundly meaningful peak experience.

Dealing with the flood crisis of 1993. A medical center's account.

On Saturday, 10 July 1993, Iowans were assaulted by the greatest natural disaster in the state's history when virtually all rain-swollen rivers and creeks in the Midwest spilled over their banks. In Des Moines, the Iowa Methodist Medical Center was suddenly surrounded by flood waters and stripped of power, water, computer, and telephone communication. Striving to deliver quality patient care in the face of the crisis, medical staff, administrators, and employees at the center achieved recovery in record time.

Flood Crisis and the F.A.O

Flood Crisis and the F.A.O