Post-disaster Period Research Articles

Increased frequency of participation in civic associations and reduced depressive symptoms: Prospective study of older Japanese survivors of the Great Eastern Japan Earthquake.

Few studies have examined whether changes in participation in civic associations can mitigate depressive symptoms among older disaster survivors. We examined prospectively the association between changes in participation in civic associations and changes in depressive symptoms among older survivors of the 2011 Great Eastern Japan Earthquake. We analyzed questionnaire-based survey data on pre- and post-disaster participation in civic associations and depressive symptoms compiled for 3567 respondents aged 65 years and above. Changes in these symptoms were assessed using a 15-item Geriatric Depression Scale (GDS) as a continuous variable for 2010 and 2013. We investigated four types of civic associations: sports, hobby, voluntary groups, and senior citizens' clubs. Changes in participation were calculated by subtracting the participation frequency measured in 2010 from that measured in 2013. Applying 95% confidence intervals, we used linear regression models with imputation to estimate the age- and sex-adjusted and multivariate-adjusted standardized coefficients. The survivors' GDS scores increased by 0.13 points on average between the pre-disaster and post-disaster periods. Average changes in the participation frequencies of respondents in each group were respectively +0.36 days/year, -5.63 days/year, +0.51 days/year, and -1.45 days/year. Increased frequencies of participation in the sports and hobby groups were inversely associated with changes in GDS scores (B=-0.003, Cohen's f2=0.10, P=0.01 and B=-0.002, Cohen's f2=0.08, P=0.04, respectively). The associations did not differ depending on the experience of housing damage caused by the disaster. In addition, we did not observe a significant association between changes in participation frequencies for voluntary groups or senior citizens' clubs and changes in GDS scores after multivariable adjustment. Depressive symptoms of older adults post-disaster may be mitigated through increased frequency of participation in sports and hobby groups; yet, civic participation did not mitigate the adverse impact of disaster experiences on mental health.

Geological and hydrometeorological hazards and related disasters amid COVID-19 pandemic in Greece: Post-disaster trends and factors affecting the COVID-19 evolution in affected areas

Since the first confirmed COVID-19 case in December 2019 the pandemic has severely affected humanity in various ways on all sectors of the everyday life. Natural hazards and related disasters did not stop for the novel virus. The parallel evolution of disasters and the pandemic have high potential for producing compound emergencies characterized by new unprecedented challenges. Greece was no exception. It was struck by disasters induced by geological and hydrometeorological hazards amid the pandemic. The most destructive events in terms of human and economic losses were the Mw = 5.7 Epirus and Mw = 6.9 Samos earthquakes on March 21 and October 30 respectively, the Evia flood on August 9 and the Ianos medicane in mid-September 2020. We studied the daily recorded laboratory confirmed COVID-19 cases in the disaster-affected areas in selected pre- and post- disaster periods. Increase of the reported COVID-19 cases in the post-disaster period has been detected only after the Ianos medicane in affected areas. No change in cases was observed after the studied earthquakes and flood. We examined various factors related to the evolving pandemic, the studied disasters and their management plan that may have contributed to the post-disaster evolution of cases. It is shown that the preexisting viral load and the infection rate in the affected areas, the intensity of the disaster effects and the measures adopted for the effective disaster management of the compound emergencies have the potential to affect the post-disaster evolution of the pandemic in the disaster affected areas.

Natural Disasters and Birth Rate: Evidence from the 2010 Chilean Earthquake

A major natural disaster can generate changes in the affected population’s behavior. As Chile is considered one of the countries with the highest seismic activity and has experienced several of the most intense earthquakes on record in the world, this work seeks to identify behavioral changes in the birth rate within an affected population related to a natural disaster in Chile. Based on evidence from the 2010 Chilean earthquake, an empirical study was carried out drawing on birth rate data and social data associated with earthquakes in Chile between 2004 and 2015. Two models were estimated. The first model is a difference-in-differences model for determining the effect of the disaster on the birth rate in the affected area in the post-disaster period. The second model is a triple-difference model that includes the trend of the data over time. The results indicate a positive relationship between the variation in the birth rate and the occurrence of the natural disaster. Studying the relationship between disaster events and fertility contributes to understanding the phenomena of social dynamics. This knowledge could improve public policy decision making for better planning in the face of a natural disaster.

Passing on Memories through Community Broadcasting in Post-disaster and Inter-disaster Periods

Passing on Memories through Community Broadcasting in Post-disaster and Inter-disaster Periods

Huddling with Families after Disaster: Human Resilience and Social Disparity

Disasters, from hurricanes to pandemics, tremendously impact human lives and behaviors. Physical closeness with family post-disaster plays a critical role in mental healing and societal sustainability. Nonetheless, little is known about whether and how family colocation alters after a disaster, a topic of immense importance to a post-disaster society. We analyze 1 billion records of population-scale, granular, individual-level mobile location data to quantify family colocation, and examine the magnitude, dynamics, duration, and socioeconomic heterogeneity of the shift in family colocation from the pre- to post-disaster period. Leveraging Hurricane Florence as a natural experiment, and Geographic Information System (GIS), machine learning, and statistical methods to investigate the shift across the landfall (treated) city of Wilmington, three partially treated cites on the hurricane’s path, and two control cities off the path, we uncover dramatic (18.9%), widespread (even across partially treated cities), and enduring (over 3 months) escalations in family colocation. These findings reveal the powerful psychological and behavioral impact of the disaster upon broader populations, and simultaneously remarkable human resilience via behavioral adaptation during disastrous times. Importantly, the disaster created a gap across socioeconomic groups non-existent beforehand, with the disadvantaged displaying weaker lifts in family colocation. This sheds important lights on policy-making and communication to promote sustainable family colocation, healthy coping strategies against traumatic experiences, social parity, and societal recovery.

Post-Disaster Collaboration between Governmental and Non-Governmental Stakeholders: The Case of Bam Earthquake, Iran

Research on cross-sector collaboration has grown over the past decade. This model of collaboration brings organizations in two or more sectors together, to link or share information, resources, activities and capabilities when no single organization has enough time, money, knowledge or authority to address them alone. In a post-disaster period, the governmental organizations particularly in developing countries usually are unable to provide all necessary services alone; hence, collaboration with other agencies is required. In the last decades, studies have used the viewpoint of collaboration between NGOs and the government, and shown a beneficial relationship between them. Most studies have focused on the structures of the collaboration in the aftermath of disasters with hierarchies, protocols, authoritarian roles and the standardization of procedures but there is a gap in analysing the process factors and the interaction of process and structural factors influencing the collaboration during post-disaster period. In this study, the aim is to identify the main factors of process and structures influencing the collaboration between Iranian government and NGOs after the earthquake in Bam city in Iran in 2003. Analysing the content of the previous studies showed that lack of experience on how to deal with disasters and unclear tasks as well as insufficient trust and mutual understanding between the actors were the main reasons of failure in collaboration. The lack of specific organizational tasks at a given time led to exacerbate the tension in the process of working together; increase the lack of common understanding, and fail to achieve the mutual goal.

On the Evaluation of the Ambulance Capacity of the Asian Side of Istanbul in the Case of a Serious Earthquake

The purpose of this study is to analyze a strategy for the assignment and transportation of injured patients to hospital to decrease the demand on transportation, in both predisaster and postdisaster periods, on the Anatolian side of Istanbul. Two approaches are used in this study: a Voronoi diagram, and a heuristic approach to the problem of scheduling. A Voronoi diagram is used to divide the city into 74 regions, where each hospital has a certain region of responsibility. The transportation strategy of 1 hospital is modeled by minimizing the makespan (ie, the maximal completion time) and the work-in-process, which are used as different objectives in scheduling theory. The total waiting time of 100 injured people was minimized to 13,036 min when a total of 3 vehicles was used in the studied region, on the Asian side of Istanbul. The transportation capacity and total operating capacity of the hospitals should be approximately equal. The people of Istanbul will be in a safer position if the suggested measures are implemented. This is an important consideration, as Istanbul is situated in a region where serious earthquakes are possible at any moment.

The impact of social media on disaster relief effort – recovery coordination for Hurricane Harvey

PurposeThis study aims to investigate patterns of social media posting occurring during the initial post-disaster recovery period. In addition, the study investigates the antecedents of user engagement with Twitter posts or “tweets.”Design/methodology/approachThis study uses Hurricane Harvey as the research focus because of its $125bn in damage and the recovery effort associated with it. Analyzing nearly 38,000 tweets related to 2017’s Hurricane Harvey and specifically focuses on rescuers who became to be known as the “Cajun Navy.”FindingsThe popularity of the tweet significantly influences social media engagement; disaster relief organizations first should seek out alliances and partnerships with those who already are well-known or influential in social media. In addition, by regularly monitoring and participating in social media, such as encouraging retweets and mentions even when not responding to a disaster, agencies will gain social media followers and influence when these are most needed.Research limitations/implicationsBy analyzing patterns of social media posts during and after Hurricane Harvey, this study attempts to quantify social media’s effectiveness during this disaster, in particular with a focus on what characteristics of Harvey-related Twitter posts most influenced user engagement.Practical implicationsFindings underscore the need for agencies to strengthen their social media presence and use it in all three phases of disaster conceptualization. Beyond managing communication with other agencies and the community, which alone is critical for an agency’s impact, social media offers the world as a potential audience for agencies that can deftly leverage it.Originality/valueSocial media has revolutionized not only communication but also inter-connectivity as people have normalized its use. Its ubiquity and efficiency have seen its incorporation into the critical area of emergency management, both during and after disasters. The main objective of this paper is to investigate and evaluate the usefulness of social media in disaster recovery efforts, focusing on its advantages in relation to a recent disaster event.

Framework for modeling multi-sector business closure length in earthquake-struck regions

Regions impacted by natural disasters such as earthquakes may suffer enormously from interruptions to their economic systems, which usually have long-lasting and profound impacts. Business closure length (BCL), which refers to the post-disaster period during which businesses completely stop their operation, is a critical indicator of the overall impacts of disaster-induced business interruptions. This study proposes a new analytical framework for modeling the BCL of businesses in different economic sectors, based on the downtimes of their operation factors. The proposed framework first identifies the essential operation factors of businesses in each sector. Then, for each individual business, the framework quantifies the downtimes of its operation factors, and establishes the quantitative relationships between these downtimes and the BCL of the business. A case study of Mianzhu, a county located in the most impacted region during the 2008 Wenchuan Earthquake, was conducted to test the performance of the proposed framework. Particularly, the BCL of businesses in the manufacturing and retailing sectors in Mianzhu was examined. The results showed that the proposed framework could estimate the BCL of all businesses with promising accuracies. The results also demonstrated that the framework could distinguish the sector-specific dependence of businesses on different operation factors, and could reflect the fact that the reopening of businesses does not require all operation factors to be fully restored to the pre-disaster level. The practical implications of the findings, and the potential of the framework to be extended for predicting the BCL before earthquakes happen, are also discussed in the paper.

Interplay between social support tie formations and subjective mental health conditions in a community currency system in Japanese disaster-affected communities: The ambivalent effects of social capital

A variety of community currency schemes have been implemented in Japanese disaster areas as a community-based tool to facilitate the revival of disaster-affected communities after the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake. One of the key variables in the recovery of these disaster-affected communities is the restoration of disaster survivors' subjective mental health conditions, yet little is known about how subjective mental health coevolves with the supportive connections emerging in the postdisaster stages. Using stochastic actor-based modelling, we show that social capital, referring to postdisaster emergent social support networks and broader engagement, not only helped 101 disaster victims overcome the mental impacts of the disaster but also empowered them to provide social support to others. However, a dilemma emerged regarding the greater engagement of residents with poor psychological statuses in supportive networks during postdisaster recovery periods, which led to differential and detrimental impacts on initially mentally healthier residents’ conditions through the contagion mechanism.

Climate Change and Violence Against Women: Study of A Flood-Affected Population in The Rural Area of Sindh, Pakistan

Climate-induced gender-based violence is an emerging area of study. Although studies on women and climate change are not new, a fresh understanding of gender-based issues and related problems are becoming of greater concern now. Women in Pakistan are generally at a disadvantage due to their societally- perceived norms, roles and responsibilities. This study aims to examine the experiences of women in flood settlement camps and to identify an association between natural disasters and violence against women. For this study, with the help of qualitative research methodology, 20 women were interviewed in the flood-prone areas of Sindh. Findings show that most women experience different types of violence, physical as well as emotional, committed by partners and even by complete strangers. The rate of such violence rises when women are displaced and are in temporary shelter facilities during a post-disaster period. Committing violence under such situations results in critical implications for both women victims and the development and implementation of gender-sensitive climate change and disaster planning policies.

THE ROLE OF THE MICROCREDIT PROGRAM IN WOMEN’S EMPOWERMENT IN A NATURAL DISASTER-PRONE AREA OF BANGLADESH: A CRITICAL ANALYSIS

Natural disasters such as cyclone and flood in the coastal areas of Bangladesh has become a common phenomenon, especially since the last two decades due to the impact of global climate change and global warming. The impacts of natural disasters among the residents of coastal areas are enormous. They face huge financial loss due to the unemployment, deaths of domestic animals, lower crop productions, broken or affected houses, and so on. In addition, they become vulnerable both physically and psychologically during and post-disaster period. However, the impacts of the natural disasters are not the same over men and women. Women become more vulnerable due to their double duties, lack of safety, and for the patriarchal nature of society. The microcredit organizations arguably try to reduce the vulnerabilities of these women by providing short-term loan and also claim to empower them. Therefore, the study emphasizes whether these women are, in reality, becoming empowered. The study was conducted among 384 women who were purposively selected from 6367 households in Southkhali Union, Sarankhola Upazila (sub-district), Bagherhat district, Bangladesh. Results show the overwhelming majority of the participants (90%) were somehow affected by the last natural disaster, either by a cyclone or flood. Regarding the usage of microcredit, the majority of the participants (57%) who are the receivers of microcredit could not use the money independently, as their husbands took the loan from them forcefully. And only 8% of them could invest the microcredit in productive activity such as starting a small business. It is worth noting that 82% of the participants mentioned that their engagement with the microcredit organizations could not change their role in the family, e.g., they could participate in the decision making procedure within the household.

Social Work Profession and Disaster Risk Reduction in Pakistan

There is a long history of Social Work, helping the weaker sections of society and those who are affected by disasters - natural or man-made. Historical records reveal that social workers have been part of the disaster relief, recovery and rehabilitation efforts because they are equipped with the required knowledge and skills. The purpose of this study is to get acquaintance about the need and importance of social work profession in disaster risk reduction in Pakistan. In addition, it also identifies the responsibilities of professional social worker in disaster mitigation and management. This study concludes that Pakistan, due to its geographical and climatic conditions is faced with disasters like earthquake, floods, windstorms, avalanches, cyclones, storms, droughts, landslides, tsunamis and epidemics. Therefore, social workers have to play an effective role in pre and post disaster period. The study recommends that social workers should make their theoretical base strong by equipping themselves with up-dated knowledge, skills and use of the new techniques of social work for the rehabilitation of individuals, groups and communities affected by the disasters.

Reinforced Secure Gossiping Against DoS Attacks in Post-Disaster Scenarios

During and after a disaster, the perceived quality of communication networks often becomes remarkably degraded with an increased ratio of packet losses due to physical damages of the networking equipment, disturbance to the radio frequency signals, continuous reconfiguration of the routing tables, or sudden spikes of the network traffic, e.g., caused by the increased user activity in a post-disaster period. Several techniques have been introduced so far (mainly using data retransmission mechanisms) to tolerate such circumstances. Among them, gossiping has been shown to be efficient in the recovery from message losses. However, a conventional gossiping scheme may exhibit security problems, which can be exploited for further attacks (such as Denial of Service - DoS attack). For instance, the flooding method used by the gossiping can be used to forward the traffic towards many vulnerable nodes to drain their resources and compromise them. Typically, protection against DoS attacks is realized by using cryptographic primitives. However, their scalability limits and costs make them improper for emergency communications after a disaster. In this article, we introduce an approach based on reinforcement learning and game theory to protect the gossiping scheme from DoS attacks without incurring the costs of cryptographic primitives. In our method, nodes properly select which requests to satisfy, which in turn helps other nodes to avoid receiving manipulated gossip messages from malicious and colluded nodes. Additionally, our method operates without exploiting any cryptographic primitives, which prevents excessive energy waste that is undesired in post-disaster resilient networking. Simulation experiments performed in OMNeT++ confirmed the advantages of our approach over the reference schemes in terms of reliability, security, overhead, latency, and power efficiency.

Slotted Hole Effect on Damage Mechanism of Gymnasium Building with RC Frame and Steel Roof

On the 2011 off the Pacific Coast of Tohoku Earthquake, gymnasium buildings exhibited the unexpected structural damages, which prevented a use as evacuation shelters in during- and post-disaster periods. The major failure occurring on the connection between the RC column top and steel roof as well as the cracks in the RC column base was observed during the emergent inspection. According to the earlier studies, it was implied that the presence of the slotted hole possibly deteriorates the seismic capacity; however, the length of slotted hole was fixed at a certain value. Facing this concern, this research attempts to clarify the influence of the slotted hole length through a comprehensive parametric study by pushover and seismic response analyses. In conclusion, it has been discovered that the slotted hole deteriorates the seismic capacity for the connection failure up to almost 50% of that without slotted hole. Moreover, the discrepancy of characteristics obtained by the static and dynamic analyses is originated by means of the presence of slotted hole. This slotted hole effect should be noted by structural engineers and researchers to provide the adequate seismic diagnosis and strengthening.

Natural Disaster Impedes the Corporate Earnings Management in the U.S.

We examine the timing and magnitude of earnings management following natural disasters to provide new insights into how and when firms manage earnings. Using difference-in-difference regressions and a sample of U.S. publicly listed firms from 1980 to 2017, we find that natural disasters reduce the magnitude of corporate earnings management by 19.5% in the two-year, post-disaster period. Natural disasters attract the attention of investors and intensify external monitoring, which results in reduced levels of corporate earnings management. In addition, we find increased information disclosure quality following disasters. Our findings of reduced earnings management following negative, external shocks contradict the predictions of big bath accounting practices.

Posttraumatic stress disorder and complicated grief in bereaved parents of the Sewol Ferry disaster exposed to injustice following the loss.

Perceived justice after man-made disaster bereavement may involve as a protective factor in the recovery process. However, perceived justice related to posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or complicated grief (CG) after disaster bereavement has not been sufficiently discussed in previous studies. This study aims to assess PTSD and CG in bereaved parents of Sewol disaster and to explore whether perceived justice is related with the diagnostic groups. Bereaved parents of Sewol disaster (N = 122) were interviewed approximately 2 years after the incident. Structured interviews for PTSD and CG were assessed, and perceived institutional justice surrounding the incident was measured. Symptom groups were identified, and multinomial logistic regression was conducted to find whether perceived justice was related with PTSD or CG. Participants showed high rates of CG and PTSD, and were classified into the both PTSD and CG group, the CG-only group and the resilient group. The analysis revealed that less perceived justice and being a mother increased the likelihood of having both PTSD and CG. Less perceived justice also showed a tendency to be associated with having CG without PTSD. Parents bereaved by the Sewol disaster had high PTSD and CG related to lower levels of perceived justice surrounding the post-disaster period. Post-disaster environment seeking justice may facilitate the natural grieving process or encourage access to effective individual interventions.

Natural disaster and political trust: A natural experiment study of the impact of the Wenchuan earthquake

How do natural disasters impact political trust in contemporary China and what is the causal mechanism? Existing literature indicates that the severity of disaster, government relief effort and information dissemination are three key factors influencing people’s political trust in the context of acute natural disasters. This study uses the Wenchuan earthquake as a natural experiment and focuses specifically on the survey data collected right before and after the earthquake. It finds that primarily due to the ‘rally round the flag’ effect and extensive media coverage, public trust in government officials at all levels rose significantly after the earthquake. During the crisis, state-run media played a vital intermediate role. The more a citizen was exposed to the official media coverage, the more likely his/her political trust was to increase. However, the division of work in disaster relief among different levels of government resulted in differences in the level of increase in trust. As local-level governments are often directly responsible for the rescue and post-earthquake relief, they gained the highest increase in political trust, while state-level officials gained the least. The short-run upsurge in political trust receded as time went by. Government mobilization and media coverage are core contributing factors to the increase in political trust during the post-disaster period. Nevertheless, the key to consolidating political legitimacy lies in long-term efforts to build good and effective governance.

Post-disaster recovery and sociocultural change: Rethinking social capital development for the new social fabric

The post-disaster period is critical for reducing vulnerability and building resilience. Social capital plays an important role in generating and maintaining risk reducing behaviour and a rich evidence base demonstrating its contribution to the recovery process exists. Yet, so far little distinction has been made between the different types of social capital, despite important variations of outcomes. To address this gap, this article examines the evolving roles of specific forms of social capital on the long-term post-disaster recovery process. We explore the disaster recovery process on the active volcanic island of Montserrat in the Caribbean, marked by rapid and intense post-disaster demographic change following the beginning of the eruption in 1995. We explore the challenges of the shift from a relatively homogenous to a relatively diverse population for building a resilient society. Our investigation illustrates the complexity of the recovery process and the coexistence of conflicting objectives which, if poorly managed, can create new forms of vulnerability and impede the sustainability of the development process. We argue that not all forms of social capital development are beneficial for the long-term recovery process. In a diversifying society, bonding social capital may have perverse effect while bridging and linking social capital may be key for building social cohesion, a key contributor to sustainable development. We argue that measures for re-development should be sensitive to the long-term effects of different forms of social capital, in particular their consequences for building social cohesion, a key contributor to sustainable recovery in a dynamically changing society.

Mass evacuation and increases in long-term care benefits: Lessons from the Fukushima nuclear disaster.

BackgroundThough mass evacuation may increase the need for long-term care (LTC) services, how the need for LTC services increases and how the public LTC system affects it is not well understood. We evaluated changes in public LTC benefits for the people living in the mandatory evacuation areas established after the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster and examined the roles of the universal LTC insurance system in Japan.MethodsIn order to evaluate the effect of the mandatory evacuation on LTC benefits, we examined the trends of LTC benefits in the Fukushima evacuation group and the nationwide non-evacuation group. We first decomposed per-elderly-individual benefits at the municipality level into the LTC certification rate and per-certified-individual benefits, and then implemented difference-in-differences analysis using these variables as outcomes.ResultsPer-elderly-individual benefits significantly increased from 2012 onward in the evacuation group, and this was explained by an increase in the certification rate rather than in per-certified-individual benefits. Increases in per-elderly-individual benefits and the certification rate in the post-disaster period were observed in all but the highest care level, and the corresponding outcomes for the highest care level decreased immediately after the disaster. We also found that the increase in the certification rate had been mostly realized by an increase in the number of certified individuals.ConclusionsThe increase in LTC benefits can be associated with the impact of the increase in the number of people newly certified to receive LTC benefits after the mandatory evacuation. In order to cope with the increase in utilization of long-term care and associated costs after disasters in aging societies, both formal long-term care services and social support for informal care for evacuees should be considered important.