Thesis (Ph.D.)--Victoria University of Wellington, 2010. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Delaware, 2009. / Principal faculty advisor: Robert E. Lyons, Dept. of Plant & Soil Sciences. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M. S.)--Public Policy, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2009. / Committee Chair: Mitchell, Helena; Committee Member: Clark, Jennifer; Committee Member: Elliott, Michael. Part of the SMARTech Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Collection.

Not available / text

Flooding poses one of the greatest natural hazard dangers to Canadians. As human populations increase and concentrate in areas vulnerable to floods, and uncertainty about future flood risk increases with the possibility of a changing climate, major urban communities, coastal settlements and communities located within floodplains are faced with an even greater risk of floods in the coming years. Canada's policies and practices towards flood control are best described as ad hoc, and have developed over the years in response to experiences with floods. No national scale flood damage reduction program exists, and there is currently no opportunity for Canadian homeowners to purchase flood insurance. This study specifically examines how a national mitigation strategy, focused mainly on non structural techniques could help decrease damages from floods in Canadian communities. The strategy proposed here is theoretically based in EPC and IBC suggestions for a greater national mitigation strategy, as well as IDNDR research, and federal, provincial and municipal goals for sustainable development and sound land use planning objectives. Ideally, a successful non structural flood mitigation strategy for Canada would address issues at the national scale, yet be implementable at the local level in accordance with community needs, risk characteristics, and local expertise. The strategy proposed here would maximize the efficiency of federal resources and private industry as well as allow local expertise and existing mitigation schemes to be formalized, bolstered and improved. There are three major components of the non structural flood mitigation strategy. Risk avoidance measures such as early warning systems, land use and resource planning and ecological conservation all work towards reducing the chances of a dangerous flood occurring. Risk spreading measures help communities deal with flood risks by improving equity and accountability, they include tax incentives, disaster financial assistance, and flood insurance. Lastly, vulnerability reduction measures help reduce damages if a flood were to strike, and these include enforcement of building codes and the maintenance of existing protective infrastructure. An integrated, non structural flood mitigation strategy would require basin-wide cooperation between all levels of government, citizens and the private sector. This strategy is also an opportunity for communities and individuals to meet goals of environmental conservation and sustainable development. The focus in this study lies on the mitigation tools, although it is the overall process of inserting the premise of mitigation into all land use and planning decision making processes that will be the key to successful flood mitigation strategies in Canadian communities.

Emergency response agencies that need to care for large crowds in real-life events, report a constant lack in human volunteers in large numbers for training purposes. Moreover, existing computerized training aides either totally omit affected crowds in their scenarios, or represent them as computer generated models. A potential solution that can provide real human input in large numbers for training purposes can be found in the form of Massive Multi-user Online Role-Playing computer Games (MMORPGs) that attract millions of users on a daily basis. In order to evaluate the use of MMORPGs as an emergency simulation platform I had to examine the in-game behaviour of participants, usability issues, data collection methods, and data reliability. I did so by constructing a multi-user computer game that included food shortage and a pandemic spread scenarios. Data collected included every possible item that could be technically logged, both qualitative (questionnaires, user’s self tagging of events) and quantitative (all in-game actions and their coordinates, players and virtual environment in-game status). The abundance of data enabled easy triangulation and verification. The main findings were: participants attention span was about 90 minutes, they demonstrated only a narrow range of behaviours necessary for their in-game survival, and this behaviour followed loosely real life behaviour patterns. Usability wise participants ignored interface components and in-game tasks that interfered with their game flow. Data reliability: unlike other methods that rely solely on participants accounts, the game had the ability to compare between actions to questionnaire answers, and was able to detect inconsistencies between people’s actions within the game and their accounts of their actions. The ability to create spatial maps of event types enabled a fast way to visually analyze data. The research concludes that MMORPGs can be used as an emergency simulation platform if: 1) its duration fits the participants’ attention span (as a result aspects of human behaviour that happen over a prolonged period of time will not be demonstrated); 2) the demographic composition of participants fits that of the population examined by the simulation; 3) participants should be properly reimbursed for their time; 4) it is known that participants’ in-game behaviour might be negatively influenced by lack of real-life experience of similar events; 5) in-game rules and mechanisms are set to filter out game abuse; 6) preliminary sessions are run to determine ideal attention span and data skewing factor.

Previous disaster management studies allude to the problems of coordination and the difficulties that may be associated with the implementation of recovery programmes in New Zealand. These studies have also indicated opportunities for improving the current recovery and reconstruction framework in advance of a major disaster. They have shown that much existing legislation were not drafted to cope with wide-scale devastations and were not developed to operate under the conditions that will inevitably prevail in the aftermath of a severe disaster. This thesis therefore explores improvements that could be made to legislative provisions so that they facilitate large-scale recovery management in New Zealand. Three legislative documents are in view: Civil Defence Emergency Management (CDEM) Act, Resource Management Act (RMA) and Building Act (BA). The research investigations involved qualitative research methodology using multi-methods to determine the practical implication of implementing current reconstruction arrangement under these legislative documents. The methods employed include: interviews, document analysis, focus group study, surveys, and the use of subject matter experts for research verification. Results show that the three legislative documents may become sources of vulnerability in post disaster reconstruction because of their influence on the timely achievement of recovery objectives. The impediments posed by these legislative documents are mainly in the form of procedural constraints; ambiguities in rights and responsibilities for recovery management; and deficiencies in the intents and purposes of the legislative documents. More general results show that pre-planning the management of disaster resources; and collaborative arrangements for response and recovery programmes are a pre-cursor to effective and efficient management of reconstruction in New Zealand. The research concludes by providing useful recommendations that are specific to the three legislative documents and other general recommendations. It is hoped the implementation of these recommendations could improve the robustness of the current reconstruction framework so that it is able to cater for the complex needs of rebuilding for resilience in New Zealand.

Despite disaster managers’ best efforts, inter-organizational disaster management suffers from varying levels of success. One factor that is likely to account for these variations is team mutual understanding, also known as common ground. To validate the potential effect of common ground in disaster management, the thesis investigates common ground in several interviews with disaster managers and in an experimental study involving an inter-organizational disaster event scenario. Analysis of interviews revealed that disaster managers perceived gaps in understanding between responders, the importance of mutual understanding, and perceived common ground similarly to depictions in theory with a few exceptions. Analyses of the experimental study indicated that contextual factors of Team composition, Problem solving approach and Type of tasks differently impacted measures of performance and implicit coordination, and that implicit coordination partially mediated and supressed the relationship between contextual factors and decision quality. Findings suggest the variation in disaster managers’ performance can be ascribed to common ground, implicit coordination, and contextual factors. Moreover, results showed the satisfaction with outcome did not correlate with expert rated quality of decision; and that while satisfaction related to consensus and quality of the decision was linked to generating alternative ideas and debate. Collaboration proved to be more effective in public communication tasks, especially for homogenous team composition. The findings support initiatives for more cross-training and further lab and field experiments.

This dissertation focuses on (river) forecasting, but also includes a study on stormwater treatment. Using forecasts for decision-making is complicated by their inherent uncertainty. An interview-based study qualitatively and a survey empirically investigate forecast use in emergency management. Emergency managers perceive uncertainty as a given rather than as a problem. To cope with the uncertainty, decision-makers gather as much information as possible; forecasts are only one piece of information among many. For decision-making, emergency managers say that they rely more on radar than on river forecasting. However, forecasts play an important role in communication with the public, because they are the official interpretation of the situation. Emergency managers can add a lot of value to those forecasts by combining them with local knowledge, but might not do so because of accountability concerns. Forecasts must have value to emergency managers, because those with more work experience rely more on them than those without. Another study further develops the application of quantile regression to generate probabilistic river forecasts. Compared to existing research, this study includes a larger number of river gages; includes more independent variables; and studies longer lead times. Additionally, it is the first to apply this method to the U.S. American context. It was found that the model has to be customized for each river gage for extremely high event thresholds. For other thresholds and across lead times, a one-size-fits-all model suffices. The model performance is robust to the size of the training dataset, but depends on the year, the river gage, lead time and event threshold that are being forecast. An additional study considers the robustness of stormwater management to the amount of runoff. Impervious surfaces, such as roads and parking lots, can increase the amount of runoff and lead to more pollution reaching streams, rivers, and lakes. Best Management Practices (BMPs) reduce the peak discharge into the storm sewer system and remove pollutants such as sediments, phosphorus and nitrogen from the stormwater runoff. Empirically, it is found that BMP effectiveness decreases sooner, steeper and deeper with increasing sizes of storm events than assumed in current computer models.

The U.S. disability population is growing at significant rates among adults as well as youth. According to the 2000 Current Population Reports, approximately 54 million Americans about 1 in 5 - are affected by the presence of a disability stemming from birth or life incident. Demographic increases are also noted among American youth as well, with one in 166 children is diagnosed with autism - estimated 67 children each day. Consequently, there have been federal-level responses in the form of legislation, executive orders and local-level program flinding such as REMS grants - addressing various disability issues. Likewise in recent years, another critically important matter has emerged with increasing priority on the nation s policy agenda: school emergency preparedness planning. A broad spectrum of crises incidents, ranging from student-initiated assaults to natural or man-made disasters, has become a well-documented reality where schools have experienced tragic impacts sometimes as severe as mass casualties These occurrences, coupled with an expected increase in potential evacuees with special needs, demonstrate the critical need for inclusive school evacuation planning at all levels of administration that actively considers its impact on vulnerable populations. This is of particular importance to public schools today; the presence of disabled students can be deduced from U.S. Census and NOES statistics while studies conducted by Georgia Tech s Center for Assistive Technology and Environmental Access (CATEA) illustrate the presence of teachers with disabilities. As the scope of interest in this field expands, the availability of related literature becomes more prevalent as well. While disability preparedness planning in schools is briefly mentioned in some articles and reports on emergency preparedness in general, it has yet to be the sole focus of one to date. Policymakers and practitioners in preparedness planning would likely benefit by broadening to its literature scope to include research that focuses solely on analyzing policy strategies and processes used in school emergency preparedness planning for students and teachers with disabilities. Therefore, this thesis project will compile available related literature into a topology in aimotated bibliography form through the lens of disability preparedness planning and policy in public schools. The research goal is to provide a qualitative assessment of available literature in the form of a reference guide of strategies and recommendations on disability preparedness, specifically intended for public school settings. Additionally, this compilation will outline the rationale supporting a more inclusive policy and planning formulation processes that actively engage the needs students and teachers with disabilities prior to the implementation stage.