This study addresses the issue of household disaster preparedness. This work contributes two elements to disaster research. The first contribution improve the knowledge of the factors that affect household disaster preparedness. The review of literature yielded three categories of variables that can jointly explain household disaster preparedness: household structure, demographics, and risk-perception factors. In this study 19 variables compose these factors. A second contribution constitutes a theoretical exploration of the concept of disaster preparedness. In this work, four different constructs of disaster preparedness were tested. These constructs include material preparedness, preparedness activities, a combined index, and a weighted and combined index. The study presents the logic and methodology of the index construction and validation. The data used in this study came from households in the Montreal Urban Community (MUC) in Canada. A random sample of 1,003 English- and French-speaking heads of households adequately represents the 1.8 million persons within the MUC. An independent survey firm conducted the interviews in 1996. Results show that the weighted combined household disaster preparedness index constitutes the best construct to represent the concepts under study. Study results also reveal that risk-perception variables (attitudinal factors) offered the strongest explanatory power. Household structure and demographic variables collectively explained less than 8% of the dependent variable. The model used in this study yielded a coefficient of determination of .320, explaining 32% of the variance in the household disaster preparedness level. Concluding this study, the discussion offers implications for both disaster managers and researchers. Researchers should add to their analysis the household perspective as a complement to the organizational one. Also, it is clear that many other conceptual issues must be explored in understanding and measuring disaster preparedness. Disaster managers should base their efforts on sound research rather than on misconceptions about social behavior. Such implications can contribute to bridging the gap and also putting into practice the knowledge drawn from this growing and collective effort of studying disasters.

This is the first longitudinal, retrospective, qualitative, descriptive and multi-case study of hurricanes in Puerto Rico, from 1899 to 1956, researching for planning purposes the key lessons from the disaster management changes that happened during the transition of Puerto Rico from a Spanish colony to a Commonwealth of the United States. The selected time period is crucial to grasp the foundations of modern disaster management, development and planning processes. Disasters are potent lenses through which inspect realpolitik in historical and current times, and grasp legacies that persist today, germane planning tasks. Moreover, Puerto Rico is an exemplary case; it has been an experimental laboratory for policies later promoted by the US abroad, and it embodies key common conditions to develop my research interface between urban planning and design, meteorology, hydrology, sociology, political science, culture and social history. After introducing the dissertation, I present a literature review of the emergence of the secular characterization of disasters and a recent paradigm shift for understanding what a disaster is, its causes and how to respond. Next, I summarize the multidisciplinary research and policy knowledge concerning Puerto Rican hurricanes. Subsequently, I explain my methodological sequential data analysis, beginning with three case studies, followed by cross-case comparisons and assessments, ending in answer, recommendations and conclusions. I implemented a version of Grounded Theory, combining deductive and inductive thinking, with a phenomenologist standpoint that valued people's experiences and interpretations of the world. I aimed to denaturalize so-called ‘natural disasters’, exposing with a political economy lens the political character of public decision-making before, during and after a disaster; and grasp how politics impacted the society under study. My research methods were archival research in the field and online, visual sociology and case study. Based on information-oriented sampling, I chose the destructive hurricanes San Ciriaco (1899), San Felipe (1928) and Santa Clara (1956), which occurred at critical historical junctures. I examined three themes: characterization, causation, and relief. Those themes divided into six sub-questions and thirty-eight variables, summarized later. Answer: Disaster management vastly improved mirroring shifting ideas of God, nature, knowledge and humanity; always influenced by the dependent position of the island. Historically, citizens tried to handle hurricanes through mythological beliefs, empirical observations, rituals and material practices; some of which endured colonization and modernization into the mid 20th century. Disaster management emerged haphazardly; at first it was ineffective and improvised relief, without much preventive or reconstructive policy-making. The official perception of hurricanes changed from being essentially uncontrollable religious or natural events, to natural events that could be tamed with technology, physical changes and policies. Yet, it was a more nuanced confluence of environmental, economic, social, cultural, and political factors that enabled storms to become destructive disasters affecting the Puerto Rican economy, environment and society. The social groups that experienced higher resilience or vulnerability during a disaster respectively corresponded to the groups that were best and least served during relief and who could or could not produce public transcripts and policies. Such division resulted from entrenched social and political arrangements, including citizens’ rights, colonial administrative policies, social hierarchy that merged local and external power dynamics, and notions of habitus . Eventually, the growing understanding of citizens’ rights was critical to reduce hurricane casualties and the worst forms of vulnerability through New Deal and Commonwealth developmental projects. By also including contentious aims though, they created other forms of underdevelopment and dependency from the US; whilst technology and modernity paradigms bolstered new risks that would become rather costly. Simultaneously, disaster management became a federal responsibility, which reached Puerto Rico; but it was the unplanned intersection of a hodge-podge of disciplines, approaches and institutions, centered on physical interventions and neglecting the role of culture and the political economy of disasters with negative lasting impacts. Although improvised, contradictory and controversial; the main factors enabling the rise of disaster management were increased governmental leadership, knowledge construction, public awareness, planning and investment in hard and soft infrastructure, and relief provision. My dissertation contributes to Puerto Rican Studies and to emerging planning discussions about the Circum-Caribbean. Also, it contributes to disaster management, an area of academic and practice-oriented literature relevant for planning, fastly growing given the rising frequency and intensity of multiple disasters; and which is usually focused on contemporary events, prospective forecasting and proposal-making. Contrastingly, my dissertation’s strengths reside in being a critical and exhaustive historical study of hurricanes that proposes an option to the customary deleterious disciplinary fragmentation of disaster studies and management, and to the emphasis on physical change that remain standards in most countries.

This thesis examines two neighborhood emergency preparedness programs: the Linn-Benton Neighborhood Emergency Training (LB NET) program in Corvallis, Oregon, U.S.A., and the Women's Neighborhood Networking Program (WNNP) in Uzhhorod, Ukraine. In Corvallis, the LB NET began in 1996, in part out of concerns that in a large disaster the local emergency agencies would not be able to provide immediate service to all disaster victims. The program encourages the residents in neighborhoods to work together to become better prepared for natural or other disasters, and to be self-sufficient for 72 hours following an event. For this study I interviewed the organizers of 14 neighborhoods between October 2001 and February 2003. Oregon State University Office of International Research and Development used the LB NET as a model to develop a project in Uzhhorod funded by U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. The WNNP was funded for one year beginning in July 2000, with a one-year extension. The project included four trips from the U.S. to Uzhhorod: to conduct a needs assessment, participant selection and initial training; two consulting/mentoring trips; and for the project finale in April 2002. All project participants and two Ukrainian coordinators traveled to Corvallis for three weeks training in April 2001. For this study the WNNP participants were interviewed in Corvallis in April 2001 and in Uzhhorod in April 2002. This thesis examines how the Uzhhorod program evolved from the Corvallis program, and similarities and differences between the WNNP participants and the LB NET organizers, including neighborhood demographics, and organizer motivation, volunteer activities and social networks. In the conclusions section, I discuss environments where each program might be successfully duplicated. / Graduation date: 2004

No abstract available. / Thesis (M.Dev. Studies)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2003.

Thesis (M.P.A.)--Missouri State University, 2008. / "May 2008." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 159-163). Also available online.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Oregon State University, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 112-124). Also available on the World Wide Web.

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Alabama at Birmingham, 2009. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed July 21, 2010). Includes bibliographical references (p. 90-93).

This thesis presents a Web-based geographic information system (GIS) application for campus emergency management that allows users to visualize, integrate, and analyze student population, facilities, and hazard data for efficient emergency management of University of North Texas before, during, and after a terrorism event. End-users can locate and search the source area of an event on a digital map from the ArcIMS-based Website. The website displays corresponding population information and attributes of impacted facilities in real time. School officials and first responders including police, firefighters and medical personnel can promptly plan the appropriate rescue and response procedures according to the displayed results. Finally, the thesis outlines the limitations of Web-based GIS in the arena of campus emergency management.

Multi-criteria decision aid has emerged from the operational research field as the answer given to a couple of important questions encountered in complex decisions problems. Firstly, as decision aiding tools, such methods do not replace the decision maker with a mathematical model, but support him to construct his solution by describing and evaluating his options. Secondly, instead of using a unique criterion capturing all aspects of the problem, in the multi-criteria decision aid methods one seeks to build multiple criteria, representing several points of view. This work explores the application of multi-criteria decision aid methods for optimising food chain countermeasure strategies after a radioactive release to the environment. The core of the thesis is dedicated to formulating general lines for the development of a multi-criteria decision aid model. This includes the definition of potential actions, construction of evaluation criteria and preference modelling and is essentially based on the results of a stakeholders’ process. The work is centred on the management of contaminated milk in order to provide a concrete focus and because of its importance as an ingestion pathway in short term after an accident. Among other issues, the public acceptance of milk countermeasures as a key evaluation criterion is analysed in detail. A comparison of acceptance based on stochastic dominance is proposed and, based on that, a countermeasures’ acceptance ranking is deduced. In order to assess “global preferences” taking into account all the evaluation criteria, an ordinal method is chosen. This method allows expressing the relative importance of criteria in a qualitative way instead of using, for instance, numerical weights. Some algorithms that can be used for robustness analysis are also proposed. This type of analysis is an alternative to sensitivity analysis in what concerns data uncertainty and imprecision and seeks to determine how and if a model result or conclusion obtained for a specific instance of a model’s parameters holds over the entire domain of acceptable values for these parameters. The integrated multi-criteria decision aid approach proposed makes use of outranking and interactive methodologies and is implemented and tested through a number of case studies and prototype tools.

This research discusses developing a FLy-Away-Kit (FLAK) to support the forming of Hastily Formed Networks (HFNs) in remote areas in support of Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief (HA/DR) operations. The initial focus will be on the requirements, situation, area of operations and mission. Different definitions and perspectives emerge when an individual mentions HFNs, HA/DR and Complex Humanitarian Disasters (CHDs). It is the author's intention to define and describe both a HFN and a CHD, in order to justify the need for the FLAK. This process will also define the requirements for the FLAK as well as facilitate processes for ensuring those requirements are met. The personnel responding to the attacks of September 11, 2001 and the December 26, 2004 Southeast Asia Tsunami suffered Command and Control (C2) and information challenges. Even more challenges are being currently addressed by Homeland Defense, Maritime Domain Awareness, and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) abroad. From the top down, levels of administration are developing new plans, procedures, and organizations that will improve the security and communication processes of our nation. A global, broadband, rapidly deployable network node complete with Internet reachback, voice, data, and video capability is of the utmost importance to enable C2 and Network Centric Operations (NCO). Undoubtedly, commercial and military organizations, traditional or new, will greatly benefit from this capability. The U.S. DoD is particularly interested in improving interaction, coordination, communications, and operations when DoD and other entities respond simultaneously to natural or man-made CHD's.