The most important aim of pre-positioning is to reduce the delivery lead time with eliminating the procurement stage by positioning items closer to the disaster area. The last 30 years&rsquo / data is used to designate the disaster trends / EM-DAT database is used to acquire the necessary data which includes the disaster locations, type of disasters and number of people affected. Also the most recent four years&rsquo / data is used for verification of the results. Locations of the optimal warehouses for pre-positioning are determined considering the generated emergency response scenarios. When we pursue this exploration, besides determining the optimal pre-positioning locations given by CARE International, we also determined where the natural disaster trend drifts towards.Therefore, this research tries to find an answer whether the disaster trends should be considered to determine the location of the pre-positioned items or not.

This study proposes a framework of simulation tool suites for ports to evaluate their response to disaster crisis and port security policies. The focus is containerized cargos that are imported through ports in the U.S. with final destinations also in the U.S. A crisis, such as a man-made or natural disaster, may cause a delay at the seaport. The down time of ports may result in severe economic losses. Thus, when a seaport cannot normally operate, it is important to minimize the impact caused by the disrupted freight flow. Port security policies also have a significant impact on the port operation efficiency. This model developed in this study evaluates the performance of re-routing strategies under different crisis scenarios and can help the user to find an effective re-routing decision and analyze security policies of a port. This model also analyzes security policies of the simulation port.

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This dissertation examines the influence of paramilitary professional cultural attributes on the speed at which disaster response organizations (DROs) recognize, respond, organize, and take action in the immediate aftermath of a disaster. Three agencies are examined: the U.S. Coast Guard, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and the U.S. military's Southern Command/Joint Task Force-Haiti. The 2010 Haiti earthquake is used as a case study to explore the influence of three independent variables: (1) paramilitarism; (2) career ladders (i.e., recruitment and professional development of staff); and (3) workforce autonomy. The purpose is to determine if paramilitary cultures help or hinder an agency's speed into action, thereby helping improve the disaster response organizations of the future. In the case of Haiti, it finds that the combination of thick paramilitary culture, insider career ladders, and high workforce autonomy best enabled responders' speed into action. / Ph. D.

Despite shifts toward a more collaborative approach to emergency management, little scholarly attention has focused on the roles of local public organizations and nonprofits that do not have explicit emergency management missions in disaster response. Scholars and government officials call for identifying key local actors and developing a more collaborative emergency preparedness approaches prior to disaster situations. In practice, emergency officials seldom recognize post-disaster efforts of these local actors. Efforts to anticipate the potential decisions and actions of organizations that do not routinely deal with disasters necessitate a better understanding of how managers perceive their post-disaster related roles and what may account for such perceptions. Focusing on public libraries in the U.S., this study draws on information gathered through surveys and semi-structured interviews with library managers and directors operating in Hampton Roads, Virginia. To further investigate variations in willingness to engage in emergency response among local jurisdictions, the study explores context-related characteristics such as organizational arrangements and features of the policy environment in which library managers operate as well as factors related to individual managerial practices. The study finds that library officials' perceptions vary across libraries. Variations range from a more defensive approach to a more proactive approach. Efforts to account for the extent to which officials would be willing to engage in a more proactive approach should consider both the emergence of individual-managers' entrepreneurial spirit and their involvement in community-based disaster planning. / Ph. D.

Thesis advisor: Hideo Konishi / My doctoral dissertation consists of three chapters on political economy and public economics. The first chapter discusses the effect of media bias on a voting competition. The second chapter focuses on how residents respond to increasing natural disaster risks in a multi-community framework. The third chapter investigates a coalition formation game with congestion effects. In chapter 1, I present a two-party election model with media noise. The media may provide polarized messages instead of those that explain the parties' actual policies. The rational voter relies on the media as an imperfect information source regarding a party's platform. Given this framework, I show that Downsian policy convergence is not valid. Moreover, when a party's ideology is relatively strong and the media bias is significant, one-sided polarization can occur: the party with more imprecise reports may adopt a more extreme strategy, whereas its opponent is more of a centrist in a perfect Bayesian equilibrium. This occurs when one party is misrepresented more often, causing the voter to think that the other party has more incentive to polarize. Therefore, the voter may favor the highly misrepresented party, which gives that party more room to polarize. I also show that parties never gain from these increasing misrepresentations, and a biased media environment can negatively affect the voter's welfare. My results suggest that the public should pursue a balanced media environment. Global warming and climate change have become increasingly important. In chapter 2, I investigate a local public goods economy using a new element: location-specific risks of disasters. Agents in this economy ``vote with their feet'' by choosing their favorite location as their residential base. In each location, all residents use majority rule to decide the local wealth tax rate and the amount of local public goods provision that can reduce the loss caused by disasters. I show that the equilibrium is wealth stratified if preferences are represented by a homothetic Stone-Geary utility function. Moreover, when disaster risks at a location increase, the population usually moves away from that location and the housing rents consequently decrease. Meanwhile, the housing rents and tax rates increase at the location the residents shift to. Moreover, I use this framework to numerically evaluate two policies: foreign donation and inter-jurisdiction transfer. If developed countries provides subsidies to a location with greater risks in a developing country, wealthier agents in the recipient country may move into the said location and force poorer agents to move out. This effect makes the wealthier the direct beneficiary of the foreign subsidy. Furthermore, I find that the inter-jurisdiction transfer may harm the poorer by rising housing rents. In chapter 3, I consider a coalition-formation problem, in which there is a set of feasible alternatives for each coalition and each player's payoff is affected by the coalition she belongs to and by its chosen alternative. In this chapter, I focus on ``congestion effects'': an agent's payoff goes down as an additional player joins the coalition other things being equal. The equilibrium notion considered is ``stability": a stable allocation (pairs of coalition structure and alternatives chosen by each coalition) is an allocation such that no coalition has an incentive to deviate from it. I find quite robust counterexamples to show that stability may fail to exist even under strong preference conditions such as the intermediate preference property and single peakedness. Nevertheless, I show a sufficient condition for the nonemptiness of stability: congruent-pair solvability. I also provide some results on the ``Nash-like" equilibrium notion. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2014. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Economics.

In last decades, the importance of flood damage and loss estimation systems has increased significantly because of its social and economic outcomes. Flood damage and loss estimation systems are useful to understand possible impacts of flooding and prepare better resilience plans to manage and allocate resources for emergency decision makers. Recent web-based technologies can be utilized to create a system that can help to analyze flood impact both on the urban and rural area. With taking advantage of web-based systems, decision makers can observe effects of flooding considering many different scenarios with requiring less effort. Most of the emergency management plans have been created using paper-based maps or GIS (Geographical Information System) software. Paper-based materials generally illustrate floodplain maps and give basic instructions about what to do during flooding event and show main roads to evacuate people from their neighborhood. After the development of GIS (Geographic Information System) software, these plans have been prepared with giving more detail information about demographics, building, critical infrastructure etc. With taking advantage of GIS, there are several software have been developed for the understanding of disaster impacts on the community. One of the widely-used GIS-based software called Hazus-MH (Multi-Hazard) which is created by FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) can analyze disaster effects on both urban and rural area. Basically, it allows users to run a disaster simulation (earthquake, hurricane, and flood) to observe disaster effects. However, its capabilities are not broad as web-based technologies. Hazus-MH has some limitations in terms of working with specific software requirements, the ability to show a limited number of flood scenarios and lack of representing real time situation. For instance, the software is only compatible with Windows operated computers and specific version of ArcMap rather than other GIS software. Users must have GIS expertise to operate the software. In contrast, web-based system allows use to reduce all these limitations. Users can operate the system using the internet browser and do not require to have GIS knowledge. Thus, hundreds of people can connect to the system, observe flood impact in real time and explore their neighborhood to prepare for flooding. In this study, Iowa Flood Damage Estimation Platform (IFDEP) is introduced. This platform is created using various data sources such as floodplain maps and rasters which are created by IFC (Iowa Flood Center), default Hazus-MH data, census data, National Structure Inventory, real-time USGS (United States Geological Survey) Stream gage data, real time IFC bridge sensor data, and flood forecast model which created by IFC. To estimate damage and loss, damage curves which are created by Army Corps of Engineers are implemented. All of these data are stored in PostgreSQL. Therefore, hundreds of different flood analyses can be queried with making cross-sectional analyses between floodplain data and census data. Regarding to level analyses which are defined by FEMA as three level, Level 3 type analysis can be done on the fly with using web-based technology. Furthermore, better and more accurate results are presented to the users. Using real-time stream gauge data and flood forecast data allow to demonstrate current and upcoming flood damage and loss which cannot be provided by current GIS-based desktop software. Furthermore, analyses are visualized using JavaScript and HTML5 for better illustration and communication rather than using limited visualization selection of GIS software. To give the vision of this study, IFDEP can be widened using other data sources such as National Resources Inventory, National Agricultural Statistics Service, U.S. census data, Tax Assessor building data, land use data and more. This can be easily done on the database side. Need to address that augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) technologies can enhance to broad capabilities of this platform. For this purpose, Microsoft HoloLens can be utilized to connect IFDEP, real-time information can be visualized through the device. Therefore, IFDEP can be recruited both on headquarters for emergency managers and on the field for emergency management crew.

Abstract The frequency of natural disasters and its negative consequences in terms of the number of people killed, property destroyed and negative environmental impacts caused in the affected communities constitute one of the basic foundations and motivations for the development and use of ICT and other means of preventing as well as responding to disasters in the world today. This is simply because disaster management constitutes an important part of any developmental framework. Unfortunately a majority of these natural disasters occur in developing countries where information flow is greatly hampered because the national actors in disasters lack the skills to use ICT to prepare for and to response to disasters in their communities. Current study aims at studying the use of ICT in disaster management in Cameroon-a less developing country south of the Sahara To achieve the aim of this study, a quantitative research approach was chosen. A total sample of 150 organisations was selected from a population of 285 organisations within Cameroon, that are directly or indirectly involved with disaster management or developmental issues of any nature. In total 150 questionnaires were administered to these selected national actors by mail, internet, telephone and self-administration and 85 of the organisations respondended to the questionnaire. After collecting and analysing the data, the authors came to the conclusions that; disasters occur in Cameroon on frequent bases causing lots of damages thus the need for ICT use in humanitarian logistics to move information and material. Results showed that national actors use the radio and local TV (CRTV) for disaster preparedness and the mobile phone for disaster response, while the internet and computer techonology, foreign TV, Fixed phone and fax had a very low usage rate or sometimes not used at all. The reason for low usage or no usage was due to problems encountered by national actors in an attempt of trying to use them. Against this background, the authors suggested a number of recommendations that could improve the degree of ICT usage. One of them was that the Cameroon government should partner with private sector firms to make ICT infrastructure available by investing more and improving on the telecommunication sector in the country. This will solve the problem of poor ICT infrastructure, poor radio and TV signals, limited internet connectivity accessibility and availability in Cameroon.

<p><strong>Abstract</strong></p><p>The frequency of natural disasters and its negative consequences in terms of the number of people killed, property destroyed and negative environmental impacts caused in the affected communities constitute one of the basic foundations and motivations for the development and use of ICT and other means of preventing as well as responding to disasters in the world today. This is simply because disaster management constitutes an important part of any developmental framework. Unfortunately a majority of these natural disasters occur in developing countries where information flow is greatly hampered because the national actors in disasters lack the skills to use ICT to prepare for and to response to disasters in their communities. Current study aims at studying the use of ICT in disaster management in Cameroon-a less developing country south of the Sahara</p><p>To achieve the aim of this study, a quantitative research approach was chosen. A total sample of 150 organisations was selected from a population of 285 organisations within Cameroon, that are directly or indirectly involved with disaster management or developmental issues of any nature. In total 150 questionnaires were administered to these selected national actors by mail, internet, telephone and self-administration and 85 of the organisations respondended to the questionnaire.</p><p>After collecting and analysing the data, the authors came to the conclusions that; disasters occur in Cameroon on frequent bases causing lots of damages thus the need for ICT use in humanitarian logistics to move information and material. Results showed that national actors use the radio and local TV (CRTV) for disaster preparedness and the mobile phone for disaster response, while the internet and computer techonology, foreign TV, Fixed phone and fax had a very low usage rate or sometimes not used at all. The reason for low usage or no usage was due to problems encountered by national actors in an attempt of trying to use them. Against this background, the authors suggested a number of recommendations that could improve the degree of ICT usage. One of them was that the Cameroon government should partner with private sector firms to make ICT infrastructure available by investing more and improving on the telecommunication sector in the country. This will solve the problem of poor ICT infrastructure, poor radio and TV signals, limited internet connectivity accessibility and availability in Cameroon.<strong></strong></p>

ITC/USA 2012 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Eighth Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 22-25, 2012 / Town and Country Resort & Convention Center, San Diego, California / The Law Enforcement Aerial Platform System (LEAPS), designed and integrated by Spiral Technology, Inc., was architected to marry airborne sensors and ground-based instrumentation in support of and to augment the Law Enforcement and/or Disaster Response and Recovery agencies of counties and municipalities. The mission of LEAPS is to provide an affordable reliable manned or unmanned aerial surveillance system that readily integrates with existing Law Enforcement's and Local Government's infrastructures. The initial sensors being integrated into the LEAPS concept include both Visible Spectrum and Infrared Imager. Salient requirements for LEAPS include: Ground Control of Airborne Sensors; Sensor Data captured and archived on the ground with time-tag and geographic location data; and Controlled Custody and Preservation of Sensor Data as Evidentiary Material This paper describes the LEAPS System Development Effort.