A Survey of Emergency Preparedness
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paper_title: The use of social media within the global disaster alert and coordination system (GDACS)

paper_content:

The Global Disaster Alert and Coordination System (GDACS) collects near real-time hazard information to provide global multi-hazard disaster alerting for earthquakes, tsunamis, tropical cyclones, floods and volcanoes. GDACS alerts are based on calculations from physical disaster parameters and used by emergency responders. In 2011, the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission started exploring if and how social media could be an additional valuable data source for international disaster response. The question is if awareness of the situation after a disaster could be improved by the use of social media tools and data. In order to explore this, JRC developed a Twitter account and Facebook page for the dissemination of GDACS alerts, a Twitter parser for the monitoring of information and a mobile application for information exchange. This paper presents the Twitter parser and the intermediate results of the data analysis which shows that the parsing of Twitter feeds (so-called tweets) can provide important information about side effects of disasters, on the perceived impact of a hazard and on the reaction of the affected population. The most important result is that impact information on collapsed buildings were detected through tweets within the first half an hour after an earthquake occurred and before any mass media reported the collapse.
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paper_title: Research Priorities in Emergency Preparedness and Response for Public Health Systems: A Letter Report

paper_content:

Committee members include Joanne Nigg, Core Faculty member, Disaster Research Center, University of Delaware.
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paper_title: Citizen communications in crisis: anticipating a future of ICT-supported public participation

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Recent world-wide crisis events have drawn new attention to the role information communication technology (ICT) can play in warning and response activities. Drawing on disaster social science, we consider a critical aspect of post-impact disaster response that does not yet receive much information science research attention. Public participation is an emerging, large-scale arena for computer-mediated interaction that has implications for both informal and formal response. With a focus on persistent citizen communications as one form of interaction in this arena, we describe their spatial and temporal arrangements, and how the emerging information pathways that result serve different post-impact functions. However, command-and-control models do not easily adapt to the expanding data-generating and -seeking activities by the public. ICT in disaster contexts will give further rise to improvised activities and temporary organizations with which formal response organizations need to align.
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paper_title: Improving Disaster Management: The Role of It in Mitigation, Preparedness, Response, and Recovery

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Information technology (IT) has the potential to play a critical role in managing natural and human made disasters. Damage to communications infrastructure, along with other communications problems exacerbated the difficulties in carrying out response and recovery efforts following Hurricane Katrina. To assist government planning in this area, the Congress, in the E-government Act of 2002, directed the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to request the NRC to conduct a study on the application of IT to disaster management. This report characterizes disaster management providing a framework for considering the range and nature of information and communication needs; presents a vision of the potential for IT to improve disaster management; provides an analysis of structural, organizational, and other non-technical barriers to the acquisition, adoption, and effective use of IT in disaster; and offers an outline of a research program aimed at strengthening IT-enabled capabilities for disaster management.
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paper_title: Coping through a Disaster: Lessons from Hurricane Katrina

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In the face of manmade and natural disasters, first responders are called upon to respond to emergencies, protect the public, and mitigate further disaster consequences. While this is a professional expectation, extreme crisis events can present an inimitable set of challenges for responders, particularly when they are personally impacted by the disaster in which they are expected to respond. The media reports of "abandonment of duty" among police officers in New Orleans during the Hurricane Katrina disaster highlight the need to better understand factors that both challenge and encourage resilience among first responders. This study examines the coping practices that fostered resilience among the officers of the New Orleans Police Department (NOPD) who served as first responders to the Katrina disaster. To gain insight into the experiences and activities of officers during the most stressful parts of the crisis, face-to-face interviews were conducted with officers (N = 57) of varying ranks and divisions. The data demonstrates the dynamic nature of coping in disasters, as well as the range of strategies practiced by first responders in crisis situations.
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paper_title: SocialEMIS: improving emergency preparedness through collaboration

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The definition of the contingency plan during the preparedness phase holds a crucial role in emergency management. A proper emergency response, indeed, requires the implementation of a contingency plan that can be accurate only if different people with different skills are involved. The goal of this paper is to introduce SocialEMIS, a first prototype of a tool that supports the collaborative definition of contingency plans. Although the current implementation is now focused on the role of the emergency operators, the accuracy of the plan will also take advantage of information coming from the citizens in future releases. Moreover, the contingency plans defined with SocialEMIS represent a knowledge base for defining other contingency plans.
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paper_title: Internet emergency alert system

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The emergency alert system available on television and radio media provides an effective means for dissipating information to the general population during emergencies. Demographic studies in the United States have shown an increasing trend towards the use of Internet by general population, and point to the fact that increased Internet usage is associated with decreased time on television and radio. Since there is no equivalent of the TV and radio emergency alert system on the Internet, a significant fraction of the population may be left without prompt information in the case of an emergency. In this paper, we explore the various options for designing an emergency alert system for users in Internet. We address the operational and technical challenges associated with each option, present alternative designs for an Internet emergency alert system, and compare the relative merits of the different approaches.
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paper_title: "OMG, from here, I can see the flames!": a use case of mining location based social networks to acquire spatio-temporal data on forest fires

paper_content:

The emergence of innovative web applications, often labelled as Web 2.0, has permitted an unprecedented increase of content created by non-specialist users. In particular, Location-based Social Networks (LBSN) are designed as platforms allowing the creation, storage and retrieval of vast amounts of georeferenced and user-generated contents. LBSN can thus be seen by Geographic Information specialists as a timely and cost-effective source of spatio-temporal information for many fields of application, provided that they can set up workflows to retrieve, validate and organise such information. This paper aims to improve the understanding on how LBSN can be used as a reliable source of spatio-temporal information, by analysing the temporal, spatial and social dynamics of Twitter activity during a major forest fire event in the South of France in July 2009.
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paper_title: The use of social media within the global disaster alert and coordination system (GDACS)

paper_content:

The Global Disaster Alert and Coordination System (GDACS) collects near real-time hazard information to provide global multi-hazard disaster alerting for earthquakes, tsunamis, tropical cyclones, floods and volcanoes. GDACS alerts are based on calculations from physical disaster parameters and used by emergency responders. In 2011, the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission started exploring if and how social media could be an additional valuable data source for international disaster response. The question is if awareness of the situation after a disaster could be improved by the use of social media tools and data. In order to explore this, JRC developed a Twitter account and Facebook page for the dissemination of GDACS alerts, a Twitter parser for the monitoring of information and a mobile application for information exchange. This paper presents the Twitter parser and the intermediate results of the data analysis which shows that the parsing of Twitter feeds (so-called tweets) can provide important information about side effects of disasters, on the perceived impact of a hazard and on the reaction of the affected population. The most important result is that impact information on collapsed buildings were detected through tweets within the first half an hour after an earthquake occurred and before any mass media reported the collapse.
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paper_title: Acute Stress Disorder, Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, and Depression in Disaster or Rescue Workers

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OBJECTIVE: The events of Sept. 11, 2001, highlighted the importance of understanding the effects of trauma on disaster workers. To better plan for the health care of disaster workers, this study examined acute stress disorder, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), early dissociative symptoms, depression, and health care utilization in disaster workers. METHOD: Exposed disaster workers (N=207) and unexposed comparison subjects (N=421) were examined at 2, 7, and 13 months after an airplane crash. RESULTS: Exposed disaster workers had significantly higher rates of acute stress disorder, PTSD at 13 months, depression at 7 months, and depression at 13 months than comparison subjects. Those who were younger and single were more likely to develop acute stress disorder. Exposed disaster workers with acute stress disorder were 3.93 times more likely to be depressed at 7 months. Those with high exposure and previous disaster experience or who had acute stress disorder were more likely to develop PTSD. Similarly, th...
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paper_title: Citizens as voluntary sensors: spatial data infrastructure in the world of Web 2.0

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Much progress has been made in the past two decades, and increasingly since the popularizing of the Internet and the advent of the Web, in exploiting new technologies in support of the dissemination of geographic information. Data warehouses, spatial data libraries, and geoportals have proliferated, and today’s users of geographic information have a wealth of potential sources that can be searched for suitable data sets. Standards have been established, issues of syntactic interoperability have been largely addressed, and rich descriptions are available in metadata to allow the suitability of a given data set to be assessed. Table digitizers used to be an essential asset for any spatial data center in the days when most sources of geographic information were in the form of paper maps, and skill in digitizing was a major part of any introduction to geographic information systems (GIS). Today, however, users rely heavily on digital sources, and virtually all digitizing is heads-up on-screen.
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Title: A Survey of Emergency Preparedness

Section 1: Introduction
Description 1: Introduce the topic of emergency preparedness, including its importance and integration with technology, and outline the paper's structure.

Section 2: Current Trends in Emergency Preparedness Research
Description 2: Discuss the major trends identified in the current literature on emergency preparedness research.

Section 3: Social Networking and the Citizen's Role in Emergency Management
Description 3: Describe how social networking tools are utilized in emergency management and the impact of public participation.

Section 4: Human Response to Disaster
Description 4: Examine the psychological and emotional responses of humans during and after emergencies and disasters.

Section 5: Use of Information Technology During Emergencies
Description 5: Explore the role of information technology and simulations in preparing for, responding to, and managing emergencies.

Section 6: Emergency Alert Systems
Description 6: Analyze the functionality and limitations of existing emergency alert systems and propose enhancements.

Section 7: Mobile Devices
Description 7: Assess the role of mobile devices and applications in emergency preparedness and response, with a focus on their capabilities and benefits.

Section 8: Future Trends
Description 8: Identify open areas of research and forecast future trends in the field of emergency preparedness.

Section 9: Conclusion
Description 9: Summarize the key findings of the survey and highlight the importance of integrating technology and social media into emergency preparedness efforts.