The Bandar Bushehr, Iran earthquake of April 9, 2013 gravely illustrates how disaster-prone areas of the world are compounding their risk of disaster and major public health emergencies when there is a geographical convergence of natural and technological hazards. Scientists must emphasize to policy makers that ever-increasing regional industrialization and the broader introduction of nuclear f...

This paper presents wireless systems for use in disaster recovery operations. The Great East Japan Earthquake of March 11, 2011 reinforced the importance of communications in, to, and between disaster areas as lifelines. It also revealed that conventional wireless systems used for disaster recovery need to be renovated to cope with technological changes and to provide their services with easier...

Disaster management that uses Web-based technology to enhance user collaboration around disasters is an emergent field. A number of dedicated 'disaster portals' exist but do not integrate large social networks such as Twitter and Facebook. These social networking sites can facilitate the analysis and sharing of collective intelligence around disaster information on a far greater scale by increa...

Technological developments, along with political and financial incentives have encouraged an increasing number of developers and researchers to develop tools and systems to aid disaster responders. To ensure adoption of these innovations evaluations are necessary. Evaluations aid in assessing the impact, the fit with the users’ requirements and the identification of improvements. However option...

Management of a disaster and emergency situation is a challenging task. Noisy and damaged environments and the limited power transmission make the scenario impracticable to support the quick rescue measure operations. Through this paper our aim is to review technological solutions for managing disaster using wireless sensor networks (WSN) via disaster detection and alerting system, and search a...

Recently, the world has witnessed the increasing occurrence of disasters, some of natural origin and others caused by man. The intensity of the phenomenon that cause such disasters, the frequency in which they occur, the number of people affected and the material damage caused by them have been growing substantially. Disasters are defined as natural, technological, and human-initiated events th...

BACKGROUND In 1992, a cargo aircraft crashed into apartment buildings in Amsterdam, killing 43 victims and destroying 266 apartments. In the aftermath there were speculations about the cause of the crash, potential exposures to hazardous materials due to the disaster and the health consequences. Starting in 2000, the Epidemiological Study Air Disaster in Amsterdam (ESADA) aimed to assess the lo...

Disasters can be defined as catastrophic events that challenge the normal range of human coping ability. The technological/human-caused disaster, a classification of interest in this article, is attributable to human error or misjudgment. Lower socioeconomic status and race intersect in the heightened risk for technological/human-caused disasters among people of color. The experience of the Nav...

With an ever-increasing volume and complexity of data collected from a variety of sources, the efficient management of geospatial information becomes a key topic in disaster risk management. For example, the representation of assets exposed to natural disasters is subjected to changes throughout the different phases of risk management reaching from pre-disaster mitigation to the response after ...