Brunkard and colleagues provide a detailed assessment of direct mortality rates in Louisiana from Hurricane Katrina, the deadliest hurricane to strike the US Gulf Coast since 1928.1 The authors should be commended on their efforts because this solidly contributes to the evidencebased literature, but the scope of this examination needs to be expanded if we are to calculate the true human cost of...

Historical records provide direct information about the climatic impact on society. Especially great natural disasters such as river floods have been for long attracting the attention of humankind. Time series for flood development on the Rhine branches Waal, Nederrijn/Lek and IJssel in the Dutch Rhine Delta are presented in this paper. In the case of the Waal it is even possible to compare his...

After a devastating earthquake and tsunami struck north-eastern Japan in March 2011, the public health system, including the infectious disease surveillance system, was severely compromised. While models for post-disaster surveillance exist, they focus predominantly on developing countries during the early recovery phase. Such models do not necessarily apply to developed countries, which differ...

Q: What personal qualities have made your career possible? A: An advantage I have is having an open mind and being humble enough to realize that you can’t be an expert in everything. As problems become bigger, especially in the case of natural disasters, we have to work more with other scientists, other engineering groups, but also with the social sciences— psychologists, disaster managers, his...

This paper describes concepts and techniques to measure the flexibility of a transportation system to accommodate changing demands and traffic patterns. Flexibility is increasingly desired as a characteristic of transport systems, particularly in light of changes in supply chains and traffic patterns, and the concern for the vulnerability of the system to both natural disasters and terrorist ac...

This data article provides macroeconomic data that can be used to generate macroeconomic volatility. The data cover a sample of seven selected countries in the Asia Pacific region for the period 2004-2014, including both developing and developed countries. This dataset was generated to enhance our understanding of the sources of macroeconomic volatility affecting the countries in this region. A...

The reconstruction of healthcare systems in developing countries after natural disasters is poorly understood. Using data collected before and after the 2010 Haiti earthquake, we detail the response of aid agencies and their interaction with local healthcare providers in Leogane, the city closest to the epicenter. We find that the period after the earthquake was associated with an increase in t...

Given a spatial network, a spatial neighbourhood, a collection of activities, and a number of clusters to identify, the problem of geometric and network based summarization is to advise our users whether to use a network-based summarization or a geometry-based one. Network summarization is an important societal problem and has been used by athorities to curb crime [15, 5, 12] and respond to nat...

Large-scale natural disasters cause external disturbances to networking infrastructure that lead to large-scale network-service disruption. To understand the impact of natural disasters to networks, it is important to localize and analyze network-service disruption after natural disasters occur. This work studies an inference of network-service disruption caused by the real natural disaster, Hu...