Apartment dwelling is on the increase in many cities Aotearoa New Zealand, including those earthquake-prone regions. Hence it important that people working disaster management and housing improve their understanding how living situations of apartment dwellers influence practices. This knowledge crucial for efforts to promote safety preparedness. paper explores what enables constrains ability pr...

Large-scale disasters have immeasurable effects on human and animal communities. Evaluating and reporting on the response successes and difficulties encountered serves to improve existing preparedness documents and provide support to those in the process of developing plans. Although the majority of disasters occur in low and middle income nations, less than 1% of the disaster literature origin...

Dear Editors, Pfenninger et al. [1] presented in a recent research paper an outline of a curriculum covering medical student disaster education. Their work demonstrated an interdisciplinary format and multi-experiential structure for a curriculum. However, understanding the rationales for including such a component in a medical curriculum might need to be clearly highlighted. Furthermore, many ...

When catastrophic earthquakes happen and affect cities and settlements, immediate and efficient actions are required which ensure the minimization of the damage and loss of human lives. Responding local and national authorities should be provided in advance with information and maps where the highest damages due to unfavourable, local site conditions and earthquake related secondary effects suc...

An important, but overlooked component of disaster managment is raising the awareness and preparedness of potential stakeholders. We show how recent advances in agent-based modeling and geo-information analytics can be combined to this effect. Using a dynamic simulation model, we estimate the long run outcomes of two very different urban disasters with severe consequences: an earthquake and a m...

Stock prepositioning is one of the most important issues in preparedness stage of emergency logistics response. In a previous research, a stock prepositioning model to support an emergency disaster relief response in the event of earthquake has been proposed. Since the results contained zero proportion of some type of item, which is not allowed in a real system, an improvement of the model is n...

In late 2005, Canadian Forces Health Services (CFHS) was tasked with the command of the NATO Role 3 Multinational Medical Unit (R3MMU) on Kandahar Airfield in southern Afghanistan. Preparations drew on past experience and planning. Eight complete hospital contingents were trained and deployed in rotation. Near-reality simulation training was undertaken with the combat brigade, including complet...

In the aftermath of earthquakes, tsunamis, such as the 2011 Great East Japan Tsunami, caused enormous damage around the world. With the extreme disaster events of the past, nations improved disaster preparedness and response through sensors and tsunami early warning systems. Even with system usage, however, governments still need to warn the targeted citizens – who may be anywhere within the vu...

Fractal correlation dimension (Dc) and the b-value methods are being used in this study with earthquakes (m l ≥ 4.0) for period 2015/4/25 to 2016/10/7 Dolakha district after Gorkha Earthquake, 2015. The entire data have been divided into 3 windows each consecutive fifty events observing temporal variation of Dc value b value. Low 0.87± 0.05 is found during between 2015/5/14 (window 1), indicate...

Disaster warning and surveillance systems have been widely applied to help the public be aware of an emergency. However, existing warning systems are unable to cooperate with household appliances or embedded controllers; that is, they cannot provide enough time for preparedness and evacuation, especially for disasters like earthquakes. In addition, the existing warning and surveillance systems ...