Information is an essential part of disaster management. Information systems (IS) are a key means of providing the right information at the right time to support response to a disaster, and fostering collaborative facilitators such as situation awareness, common ground and communities of practice. However for these collaborative facilitators to support ‘downstream events’ (i.e. disaster respons...

Disaster management and risk prevention in Algeria have undergone many changes in the recent years. Important efforts have been provided on the legal and organizational sides to set the right conditions for an integrated and collaborative framework for disaster management in the country. The aim is to address the lack of information sharing, coordination and collaboration among the involved org...

Volunteered geographic information (VGI) refers to the widespread engagement of citizens in the creation of geographic information, often through social media, smartphones and online mapping tools. It represents a shift in the ways information is created, shared, used and experienced, and has important implications for disaster management. This research examines the potential role of VGI in fos...

A robust, decentralized information management system and reliable transport of information between disconnected agents is essential to the success of command and control activities in disaster relief scenarios. We present work-in-progress aimed at developing a distributed hash table (DHT) protocol and a delay-tolerant network that meet the specific requirements of disaster relief scenarios thr...

Disaster preparedness and disaster response should be a capability of all academic health centers. The authors explore the potential role and impact of academic medical centers (AMC)s in disaster response. The National Disaster Medical System and the evolution of disaster medical assistance teams (DMAT) are described, and the experience at one AMC with DMAT is reviewed. The recent deployment of...

Natural disasters can cause significant numbers of severe, disabling injuries, resulting in a public health emergency and requiring foreign assistance. However, since medical rehabilitation services are often poorly developed in disaster-affected regions and not highly prioritized by responding teams, physical and rehabilitation medicine (PRM) has historically been underemphasized in global dis...

The objective of this study was to assess the impact of a major disaster on county-level preparedness for persons with mobility disabilities. The authors surveyed 30 randomly selected Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) disaster sites between 1998 and 2003 to determine disability surveillance capacity, the extent to which the disaster experience influenced changes in policies and practic...