Economic Impacts of Spillover Effects of Terrorism Countermeasures at Public Assembly Sites

In recent years, there have been many high-profile attacks on large, relatively unprotected venues, including entertainment and shopping complexes in the U.S. and around the world. Public and private decision-makers can choose from a wide array of terrorism countermeasures. A question arises as to whether patrons’ complaints about delays, inconvenience and invasion of privacy actually translate into decisions to attend fewer such events. This paper presents the bottom-line economic impacts of terrorism countermeasures on business revenue at three public assembly venues and on their surrounding regional economic activity. These venues include an MLB Stadium, an NBA/NHL Arena, and a Convention Center. The analysis is based primarily on survey responses relating to changes in attendance that stem from public perception of the implementation of four major types of countermeasures. The surveys indicated that the majority of patrons were not affected either way by the presence of the countermeasures, but nearly all of the remainder felt more secure in the presence of the countermeasures to both terrorism and ordinary crime, which resulted in an increased likelihood of attendance. The economic impact estimates yield a small but notable positive impact on business revenues, though this outcome varies significantly across venue types.

Examining the Potential Impacts of Social Vulnerability on Damage Levels in Areas Affected by Hurricane Harvey

To our knowledge, this is one of the pioneering studies that examined the associations between changes in different dimensions of social vulnerability from 2000 to 2016 on damage levels resulting from Hurricane Harvey. The empirical work was based on data obtained from the FEMA Modeled Building Damage Assessments Harvey 20170829 and the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR)’s Geospatial Research, Analysis & Services Program (GRASP). Results from linear mixed effects modeling and the spatial error and CAR models suggested that damage level was determined by certain aspects of social vulnerability; the level of damage increased with inundation depth, population aging, and the proportion of minority population. Efforts to promote resilience in natural disasters should focus on individuals living in areas characterized by increases in population aging and minority population. Results also revealed that certain processes associated with economic growth and urban development might affect an area’s resilience and susceptibility to natural disasters and the processes associated with disaster response and mitigation.

Incorporating Ethics in Disaster Communication Strategy: The Case of the U.S. Government in Deepwater Horizon

BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill in April 2010 was a major test of the National Incident Management System (NIMS), which the United States federal government mandates for response to all disasters. At the time, this disaster was perhaps the greatest event in scope and duration under NIMS disaster management guidelines since they were revised in 2008 (the third edition was published in 2017). Ten years later, NIMS provides procedures for operating a joint information center (JIC), but still offers no guidelines for ethical communication. This case study examines the ethical implications of 178 news releases distributed by the Deepwater Horizon Incident JIC. Qualitative analysis found that communication was conducted in an open, ethical manner, with few exceptions. Conflicts emerged, however, that may have compromised ethical standards. The authors conclude with recommendations to inform ethical decision making by JIC communicators.

The Hazard Consequence Prediction System: A Participatory Action Research Approach to Enhance Emergency Management

Emergency managers (EMs) need nuanced data that contextualize the local-scale risks and impacts posed by major storm events (e.g. hurricanes and nor’easters). Traditional tools available to EMs, such as weather forecasts or storm surge predictions, do not provide actionable data regarding specific local concerns, such as access by emergency vehicles and potential communication disruptions. However, new storm models now have sufficient resolution to make informed emergency management at the local scale. This paper presents a Participatory Action Research (PAR) approach to capture critical infrastructure managers concerns about hurricanes and nor’easters in Providence, Rhode Island (USA). Using these data collection approach, concerns can be integrated into numerical storm models and used in emergency management to flag potential consequences in real time during the advance of a storm. This paper presents the methodology and results from a pilot project conducted for emergency managers and highlights implications for practice and future academic research.

Stochastic Modeling of Non-linear Terrorism Dynamics

Modeling terrorism is both necessary and difficult. While the necessity comes from the all too obvious real-world pressures our society is facing, the difficulty stems from the underlying complexity of the phenomena itself – there are many variables to account for, they are hard to measure, and the relationships between them are confounding. Since modeling terrorism is at its most onerous when it comes to predicting specific attacks, their timing and scale, we opted to work around this using observed probabilistic distribution and integrate power laws into our system dynamics model. After evaluating thousands of simulations runs, this allows us to replicate historical data as well as produce prognostic scenarios, while maintaining what we believe to be authentic behavior. Compromises need to be made, but we believe that this approach can be useful for systems highly dependent on events or parameters which we are unable to predict but whose distributions are known.