Two Fires and a Flood

This chapter explores the ongoing path toward disaster preparedness taken by Los Alamos County Library System. The library system has experienced three disasters since the year 2000, the Cerro Grande Fire; a cloudburst that sent water pouring through the library's skylight, and the Las Conchas Fire. The author tells the stories of these disasters, and their impacts on the library, its staff and community, with some emphasis on the emotional impacts. These stories and the lessons learned from them are interwoven with the steps and missteps in the writing of the library's disaster preparedness manual and the ongoing need to keep preparedness efforts active. The importance of forming supportive relationships with colleagues in the local government and with regional library cohorts, and the magnitude of the role the library staff, collections and facility already had in the community, a role that expanded in the recovery process, are highlighted.

Disaster, Vulnerability, and Violence Against Women

Studies of natural disasters have adequately focused on gendered aspect of disaster and women's vulnerability and offered suitable suggestions though only few of these have focused on the issue of the relation between disaster and violence against women. By undertaking meta-analysis of cross-cultural studies, this paper aims to provide an overview of connections between disaster, women's vulnerability and violence against women and to highlight the importance and the relevance of similar researches in Bangladesh. Natural threats are real and moderated by existing socio-economic arrangements and cultural norms in Bangladesh where gender relationships are unequal and violence prone. Therefore it is expected that the lessons of international experiences and insights will help to develop a gendered research framework to understand ‘how violence against women is increasing following disasters' in the context of Bangladesh. And finally, that would pave the way for policy options to form a better co-existence for both men and women which would be more equal, dignified and violence free.

E-Solidarity and Exchange

Between October 24 and 25 in 2015, Mexico faced the strongest hurricane ever registered in the Western Hemisphere, which reached a record of 200 mph (325 km/h) of maximum sustained winds. In spite of pessimist predictions about the final outcome of this natural disaster, at the end, it degraded itself into a tropical storm when landing in the Mexican state of Jalisco. The present research stands in a data collecting process from social media during two moments: a) throughout the happening and b) after the incident. It collected not only information and comments generated in federal and local governmental public profiles but in civil organizations and private user profiles as well. This paper describes how social media helped not only to socialize public information in order to prevent danger but it also served as a link between governmental dependencies and civil society to support affected communities after the event.

A Recent Systematic Review on Simulation Modeling and Emergency Departments

Healthcare, being a complex and huge system, suffers from low quality of care delivered to arriving patients. The quality of care depends on the patient's condition and the availability of hospital's resources. Therefore, many authors have studied the problems faced by such systems and emphasized in their articles the importance of a system review for better performance. In healthcare, different departments interact with each other in order to deliver a certain service to arriving patients and provide the recommended care. In particular, the emergency department (ED) is proven to be the busiest unit of the hospital; thus, the exiting problems and recommended solutions are highlighted in this study by a literature systematic review. The main goal of this article is to study the problems that EDs face nowadays and how simulation modeling can interfere in order to alleviate these problems, propose corresponding solutions and increase patient satisfaction.

Burst Pipes and Leaky Roofs

Libraries can face different kinds of emergency but planning for every contingency is an immense challenge. Overwhelmed with books and articles that focus mainly on the catastrophic events, librarians tend to place more emphasis on managing the risk of hurricanes and floods leaving then underprepared for the more mundane and common emergencies like burst pipes and leaky roofs. This chapter uses two case studies of small water emergencies to examine how each library managed those emergencies and what lessons were learned. They show that while both incidents were water-related, they were very different in terms of source, size, impact, recovery time, and frequency. Libraries should be planning for small disasters first, and then scaling up preparation to account for the larger events, rather than the reverse. More libraries may do such planning if they are preparing for a probable scenario rather than one that is only a possibility.

Communicating Location and Geography in Emergency Response

Response organizations often face serious challenges as a result of communication problems during emergency events. This can to a large extent be traced to the tradition of verbal communication in this context. Issues in communication translate to matters of sensemaking, planning, and collaboration among distributed response teams. This paper reports from an interview study with emergency managers regarding the work conducted during a wildfire. Boundary objects and sensemaking were used as analytical lenses, emphasizing how outcome of sensemaking activities are used at different sites and interpreted differently in different work settings. Challenges of verbally exchanging complex information regarding location and geography, between individuals and groups, make us reconsider the role of technology and its potential to support efficient interactions, which will limit ambiguity and uncertainty, and increase accuracy, articulation, and persistence.

Environmental Policies for Emergency Management and Public Safety

Policy refers to the commitment of people or organization to the laws, regulations, and other green mechanisms concerning environmental issues. Community participation has become important in government, policy makers, and environmentalists over last few decades, and as a result, it is now an established principle as it is widely used not only in academic literature but in policy-making documents, international discussions, as well as in local debates when considering issues dealing with decision-making to achieve sustainable development. Implementation of green policy and community participation programs through representatives—organization, groups of individuals—enhances the benefits of polices and program and adds value to policy as well as making the policy's results and responses more effective and stronger.

M-Government for Emergency Notifications

This study examines the use of mobile devices for the delivery of emergency notifications to end users from a mobile government (m-government) perspective. The study is informed by the task-technology fit model, technology acceptance models, and the literature on emergency management. Our findings indicate that the task, technology, behavioral, and to a lesser extent situational characteristics affect the use of m-government for the delivery of emergency notifications. Additional themes of equity and dependence emerge as relevant to user perceptions. This paper contributes to the m-government literature by examining and presenting findings relevant to emergency management and provides insights on the user perceptions of m-government for emergency notifications. This study also has implications for all levels of government including local, state, and federal. Lastly, as mobile technology use grows in the public domain this type of study advances the goal of using information and communications technologies (ICTs) to benefit human well-being.

WiPo for SAR

WiPo (Web in your pocket) is a prototypical mobile information provisioning concept that can offer potential benefits to a range of situations where data sources are vast, dynamic and unvalidated and where continuous Internet connectivity cannot be assured. One such case is that of search and rescue (SAR), a unique case of emergency management characterized by the need for high-quality, accurate and time-sensitive information. This paper reports on empirical research undertaken to explore the potential for a real-world application of a mobile service such as WiPo which is based on the delivery of highly curated, multi-source data made available offline. Adopting an interpretive interview-based approach, the authors evaluate the potential usefulness of WiPo for search and rescue incidents in New Zealand. Upon learning of the core functionality of WiPo and the alignment of that with the typical search and rescue situation, study participants were unanimously positive about its potential for improving search and rescue management and outcomes.

Analysis and Comparison of the Role of Local Governments With Other Policy Actors in Disaster Relief via Social Media

This chapter examines the social media use by local governments, and other policy actors (government agencies, non-governmental organizations and citizens) after the 2011 Van Earthquake in Turkey. This study is different from others examining social media use of just one policy actor after a disaster; as it compares and contrasts the performance of different policy actors with that of local governments. To this end, contents of the messages posted on selected Facebook pages after the earthquake are analyzed. The findings include examples of effective social media use for disaster relief and recovery, as well as detailed information about the nature and functioning of “multiple/parallel systems of public service/information delivery”, more than one electronic channel of communication and coordination simultaneously connecting people and organizations. The findings suggest that, if institutional arrangements conducive to collaborations are present, social media platforms can be effective means of disaster relief and recovery, especially for communication among citizens after a disaster.