This minor field study has explored what factors cause vulnerability to community members living in informal settlements exposed to localized urban flooding. Particularly, the effects of flooding that women living in Bwaise Parish III, Kampala, Uganda have to encounter were studied. Eight weeks were spent in Kampala, Uganda for field work, which included interviews and a workshop with community members from Bwaise Parish III, interviews with scientists at Makerere University and thesis writing. Generally, small-scale disasters surface because of poor urban management. The results showed that inadequate urban planning was affecting the poor that were living on marginal lands. Bwaise Parish III had emerged on a location that was both hazardous and unhealthy. The analysis showed that poor people were limited in their options of risk limitation because of their lack of basic capabilities. Women in Bwaise Parish III were affected by flooding directly and indirectly through the loss of livelihoods and belongings and through time spent getting water out of their houses. Women were generally disproportionally affected by flooding because of their vulnerabilities such as lower socioeconomic status and responsibilities that confined them to their homes. The way forward in order to mitigate localized flooding impacts would entail reducing vulnerabilities, strengthening capabilities and developing infrastructure. / Denna Minor Field Study har undersökt vilka faktorer som orsakar sårbarheter för samhällsmedlemmar som bor i informella bosättningar som exponeras av småskaliga  översvämningar. Det som studerades var effekterna av dessa översvämningar och hur kvinnor i Bwaise Parish III i Kampala, Uganda drabbades. Åtta veckor tillbringades i Kampala för fältarbete som innehöll intervjuer och en workshop med samhällsmedlemmar från Bwaise Parish III, intervjuer med forskare vid Makerere Univeritetet samt uppsatsskrivande. Generellt sätt så brukar småskaliga katastrofer uppstå på grund av dålig stadsförvaltning. Resultaten visade att bristande stadsplanering påverkade de fattiga som levde på marginella marker och att Bwaise Parish III låg på en plats som var både farlig och ohälsosam. Analysen visade att fattiga människor var begränsade i sina möjligheter att minska sina risker på grund av att de saknade grundläggande förutsättningar. Kvinnor i Bwaise Parish III påverkades av översvämningar både direkt och indirekt genom förlusten av försörjningsmöjligheter och tillhörigheter och genom att de var tvungna att spendera tid med att få bort vatten från deras hem. I allmänhet drabbas kvinnor oproportionerligt av översvämningar på grund av deras sårbarhet såsom lägre socioekonomisk status och ansvar som begränsar dem till deras hem. Vägen framåt för att minska småskaliga översvämningar och konsekvenser skulle innebära att minska sårbarheten för samhällsmedlemmarna, öka deras förutsättningar och utveckla en fungerande infrastruktur.

<p>A fire in Salem, Mass., in 1914 and an explosion in Halifax, N.S., in 1917 provide an opportunity to explore working-class institutions and organizations in the United States-Canada borderlands. In a historical moment in which the state greatly expanded its responsibility to give protection and rescue to its citizens, after these two disasters ordinary survivors preferred to depend on their friends, neighbors, and family members. This dissertation examines which institutions--including formal organizations like unions and fraternal societies as well as informal groups like families and neighborhoods--were most relevant and useful to working-class survivors. Families, neighbors, friends, and coworkers had patterns and traditions of self-help, informal order, and solidarity that they developed before crisis hit their cities. Those traditions were put to unusual purposes and extreme stress when the disasters happened. They were also challenged by new agents of the state, who were given extraordinary powers in the wake of the disasters. This dissertation describes how the working-class people who most directly experienced the disasters understood them and their cities starkly differently than the professionalized relief authorities.</p><p>Using a wide array of sources--including government documents, published accounts, archived ephemeral, oral histories, photographs, newspapers in two languages, and the case files of the Halifax Relief Commission--the dissertation describes how elites imposed a progressive state on what they imagined to be a fractured and chaotic social landscape. It argues that "the people" for whom reformers claimed to speak had their own durable, alternative modes of support and rescue that they quickly and effectively mobilized in times of crisis, but which remained illegible to elites. By demonstrating the personal, ideological, political, and practical ties between New England and Nova Scotia and Quebec, it also emphasizes the importance of studying American and Canadian history together, not only comparatively but as a transnational, North American whole.</p> / Dissertation

In the aftermath of the nuclear accidents at Chernobyl in Russia, at the Three Mile Island reactor in the United States and the nuclear criticality accident at the Tokai-mura JCO in Japan, the need for serious attention has been directed toward response planning for nuclear emergencies. Currently Taiwan has one of the highest population densities in the world. To handle energy needs, there are three nuclear facilities. Recently the first serious electrical failure occurred at the third nuclear reactor (3A). This incident in particular brought the need for proper measures to handle accidents to the attention of the public. The main purpose of this thesis is to investigate the effectiveness of the national planning for handling nuclear emergencies under the existing laws for nuclear accident emergency response and the laws for disaster prevention at the local government level. Attention is given to the capability of the design and organizational system for handling nuclear emergencies and whether this plan can be realized in actual practice. Having reached a thorough understanding through the analysis, the paper makes suggestions about the procedures to be followed for the national government¡¦s handling of nuclear plant emergencies.

In this thesis, risk management methods are investigated in order to integrate risk management practices into the Turkish Aerospace industry. The research presents the sequence of risk management processes as identification of risk, analysis of risk, risk planning etc. Risk analysis methods named as Risk Ranking and Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) are investigated in order to improve reliability and safety of the systems or processes in the aerospace industry. The main aim of using risk ranking and AHP together is to translate the knowledge in the Turkish Aviation Industry to a tangible form with a quantitative approach and to prepare a basis for probabilistic risk analysis. Instrument Landing System (ILS) has been considered only in order to facilitate a demonstration how risk management can be done in this context. This study investigates and seeks to create awareness for risk management practices within Turkish Aviation industry.

In this study, the failure mechanism of the shore landslide which occured at Degirmendere coast region during 17 August 1999 Kocaeli (Izmit) - Turkey earthquake is analyzed. Geotechnical studies of the region are at hand, which reveal soil properties and geological formation of the region as well as the topography of the shore basin after deformations. The failure is analyzed as a landslide and permanent displacements are calculated by Newmark Method under 17 August 1999 Izmit record, scaled to a maximum acceleration of 0.4g. There are discussions on the main dominating mechanism of failure / landslide, liquefaction, fault rupture and lateral spreading. According to the studies, the failure mechanism is a seismically induced shore landslide also triggered by liquefaction and fault rupture, accompanied by the mechanism of lateral spreading by turbulence. A seismically induced landslide is discussed and modeled in this study. The finite element programs TELSTA and TELDYN are employed for static and dynamic analyses. Slope stability analyses are performed with the program SLOPE. The permanent displacements are calculated with Newmark Method, with the help of a MATLAB program, without considering the excess pore pressures.

The aim of this study was to investigate Meteorological Fire Danger Indices for Turkey. A number of internationally implemented fire danger indices were calculated with Fire Danger Processing software and their performances were tested with Mandallaz and Ye&rsquo / s Performance Score Method. As a result, among other meteorological fire danger indices that have been applied by several fire fighting administrations and services, the U.S. National Fire Danger Rating System, Mc.Arthur&rsquo / s Fuel Moisture Model and Forest Fire Weather Index, BEHAVE Fine Fuel Moisture Model and Keetch Byram Drought Index, the Canadian Fire Weather Index was selected as the best performing fire danger index for Turkey. Calibrated with monthly fire history data of the last 5 years&rsquo / records, the results during the determined fire season were integrated with vegetation cover data for Turkey, derived from GLC 2000 global land cover data. Besides, daily performance of the Canadian Fire Weather Index was observed by three consecutive days in August 2006 and the outcomes were evaluated with the information about fire events compiled from newspaper archives. The study is a first attempt for further fire related analysis at the national scale / an attempt to establish an early warning system and a spatial base for mitigation effort for the wild fire phenomenon in Turkey.

Estimation of the ground motion parameters is extremely important for engineers to make the structures safer and more economical, so it is one of the main issues of Earthquake Engineering. Peak values of the ground motions obtained either from existing records or with the help of attenuation relationships, have been used as a useful parameter to estimate the effect of an earthquake on a specific location. Peak Ground Velocities (PGV) of a ground motion is used extensively in the recent years as a measure of intensity and as the primary source of energy-related analysis of structures. Consequently, PGV values are used to construct emergency response systems like Shake Maps or to determine the deformation demands of structures. Despite the importance of the earthquakes for Turkey, there is a lack of suitable attenuation relationships for velocity developed specifically for the country. The aim of this study is to address this deficiency by developing an attenuation relationship for the Peak Ground Velocities of the chosen database based on the strong ground motion records of Turkey. A database is processed with the established techniques and corrected database for the chosen ground motions is formed. Five different forms of equations that were used in the previous studies are selected to be used as models and by using nonlinear regression analysis, best fitted mathematical relation for attenuation is obtained. The result of this study can be used as an effective tool for seismic hazard assessment studies for Turkey. Besides, being a by-product of this study, a corrected database of strong ground motion recordings of Turkey may prone to be a valuable source for the future researchers.

Due to the randomness inherent in the occurrence of earthquakes with respect to time, space and magnitude as well as other various sources of uncertainties, seismic hazard assessment should be carried out in a probabilistic manner. Basic steps of probabilistic seismic hazard analysis are the delineation of seismic sources, assessment of the earthquake occurrence characteristics for each seismic source, selection of the appropriate ground motion attenuation relationship and identification of the site characteristics. Seismic sources can be modeled as area and line sources. Also, the seismic activity that can not be related with any major seismic sources can be treated as background source in which the seismicity is assumed to be uniform or spatially smoothed. Exponentially distributed magnitude and characteristic earthquake models are often used to describe the magnitude recurrence relationship. Poisson and renewal models are used to model the occurrence of earthquakes in the time domain. In this study, the sensitivity of seismic hazard results to the models associated with the different assumptions mentioned above is investigated. The effects of different sources of uncertainties involved in probabilistic seismic hazard analysis methodology to the results are investigated for a number of sites with different distances to a single fault. Two case studies are carried out to examine the influence of different assumptions on the final results based on real data as well as to illustrate the implementation of probabilistic seismic hazard analysis methodology for a large region (e.g. a country) and a smaller region (e.g. a province).

The current study aimed to examine two potential positive outcomes of an earthquake experience, namely posttraumatic growth (PTG) and earthquake preparedness behavior. Variables that may be related to PTG and earthquake preparedness behavior were examined after earthquake victimization by using two models, which were the Person Relative to Event (PrE) Model (Mulilis &amp / Duval, 1997) to understand earthquake preparedness behavior, and Model of Life Crises and Personal Growth (Schaefer &amp / Moos, 1992) to understand PTG. In order to examine earthquake preparedness behavior, the roles of demographic variables, event-related variables, cognitive appraisal factors, and coping strategies, and in order to examine PTG, environmental factors, system factors, event related factors, earthquake specific coping and cognitive appraisal factors, and general ways of coping responses factors were examined. Data was collected by a questionnaire consisting of three parts. The first part was a socio-demographic information form. The second part of the questionnaire included set of items designed to examine past earthquake experience, the severity of past earthquake experience and reasons to prepare for a possible future earthquake. The third part of the questionnaire consisted of eight scales. These scales were Ways of Coping Inventory (WCI) to measure coping strategies used in stressful situations, Revised and Translated Mulilis-Lippa Earthquake Preparedness Scale (MLEPS) to measure the level of earthquake preparedness behavior, perceived difficulty and perceived effectiveness of being prepared, Religiousness Scale (RS) to measure the level of religious resources of participants, The Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support (MSPSS) to measure perceived adequacy of social support, The Quality of Life Scale (WHOQOL) to measure the quality of life of the participants, Psychological Well-Being Scale to measure the level of psychological well-being of participants, Traumatic Stress Symptom Checklist (TSSC) to measure posttraumatic stress, and Post-traumatic Growth Inventory (PTGI) to measure stress-related growth. One hundred ninety nine adults (105 females and 94 males with an age range of 18 to 73) were participants of the study. The participants were from Kaynasli, D&uuml / zce. The participants were selected on the basis of their age, gender, and the type of their houses. They were contacted through home visits. In the result section, the level of the different categories of earthquake preparedness behavior, self-efficacy and outcome efficacy / the reasons of preparedness and nonpreparedness for earthquakes, the variables related to earthquake preparedness behavior and PTG were presented. Hierarchical regression analysis results revealed that perceived responsibility to prepare for earthquakes, outcome efficacy, and problem-focused coping were positively and posttraumatic stress was negatively related to earthquake preparedness behavior. As a result of the regression analysis, it was found that being married, perceived social support, well-being, problem-focused coping, and seeking social support coping were significant predictors of the level of PTG. The results of regression analysis also showed that, general problem focused coping was more efficient than earthquake specific active coping after earthquake victimization for the development of PTG. The results of the study were discussed within the relevant literature, shortcomings of the current study, clinical implications and suggestions for future research were proposed.

<p>Past decades have witnessed evidence to large-scale upheaval caused by natural disasters. Thus, there is a need for determination of mechanisms through which natural disasters may influence growth, especially for developing countries. This paper traces the medium-short run time path of agricultural and industrial output growth response to four types of disasters in Southern and Southeastern Asian countries. Disasters considered are floods, droughts, storms and earthquakes. The empirical results suggest heterogeneous effects for disasters as well as different economic sectors. In many cases disaster impact was delayed. Generally speaking, floods and droughts have a stronger effect while earthquakes and storms have a weaker one on disaggregated output growth. Floods have a predominantly posi-tive effect while droughts have a negative one on both agricultural and industrial sectors. Storms seem to show a stronger negative effect in the agricultural sector than in industrial sector hinting at existence of short lived indirect effects. Earth-quakes, on the other hand, presented ambiguous growth responses.</p> / No