Evolving issues in Australian emergency management

This article examines some the challenges facing emergency management organizations (EMO's) and policy-makers in Australia. It considers how EMO's will need to be ready to prepare for and, where possible prevent, a range of evolving threats into the future. Such an ability to anticipate capability needs via effective threat assessment and response planning is a needed evolutionary response

What are Some Best HR Practices in Response to Natural Disasters in Terms of Training and Communication?

Today’s world is defined by, among other characteristics, borderless and unconventional threats, global challenges, and fast-paced change. HR has not been initially designed to organize or oversee crisis management. However HR’s role in training and development can contribute to an organization’s overall crisis management capacity, as well as to effective crisis communication in particular. Studies show that crisis-prepared companies have fewer crises to grapple with, stay in business longer and fare better in financial terms

Flooding through the lens of mobile phone activity

Natural disasters affect hundreds of millions of people worldwide every year. Emergency response efforts depend upon the availability of timely information, such as information concerning the movements of affected populations. The analysis of aggregated and anonymized Call Detail Records (CDR) captured from the mobile phone infrastructure provides new possibilities to characterize human behavior during critical events. In this work, we investigate the viability of using CDR data combined with other sources of information to characterize the floods that occurred in Tabasco, Mexico in 2009. An impact map has been reconstructed using Landsat-7 images to identify the floods. Within this frame, the underlying communication activity signals in the CDR data have been analyzed and compared against rainfall levels extracted from data of the NASA-TRMM project. The variations in the number of active phones connected to each cell tower reveal abnormal activity patterns in the most affected locations during and after the floods that could be used as signatures of the floods - both in terms of infrastructure impact assessment and population information awareness. The representativeness of the analysis has been assessed using census data and civil protection records. While a more extensive validation is required, these early results suggest high potential in using cell tower activity information to improve early warning and emergency management mechanisms.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Global Humanitarian Technologies Conference (GHTC) 201

Current capabilities, requirements and a proposed strategy for interdependency analysis in the UK

The UK government recently commissioned a research study to identify the state-of-the-art in Critical Infrastructure modelling and analysis, and the government/industry requirements for such tools and services. This study (Cetifs) concluded with a strategy aiming to bridge the gaps between the capabilities and requirements, which would establish interdependency analysis as a commercially viable service in the near future. This paper presents the findings of this study that was carried out by CSR, City University London, Adelard LLP, a safety/security consultancy and Cranfield University, defense academy of the UK

Climate change and its risk reduction by mangrove ecosystem of Bangladesh

Climate change is amongst the most dreaded problems of the new millennium. Bangladesh is a coastal country bounded by Bay of Bengal on its southern part and here natural disasters are an ongoing part of human life. This paper discusses about the possible impact of climate change through tropical cyclones, storm surges, coastal erosion and sea level rise in the coastal community of Bangladesh and how they cope with these extreme events by the help of mangrove ecosystem. Both qualitative and quantitative discussions are made by collected data from different research work those are conducted in Bangladesh. Mangrove ecosystem provides both goods and services for coastal community, helps to improve livelihood options and protect them from natural disaster by providing variety of environmental suppor

Real-time cross-layer design for large-scale flood detection and attack trace-back mechanism in IEEE 802.11 wireless mesh networks

IEEE 802.11 WMN is an emerging next generation low-cost multi-hop wireless broadband provisioning technology. It has the capability of integrating wired and wireless networks such as LANs, IEEE 802.11 WLANs, IEEE 802.16 WMANs, and sensor networks. This kind of integration: large-scale coverage, decentralised and multi-hop architecture, multi-radios, multi-channel assignments, ad hoc connectivity support the maximum freedom of users to join or leave the network from anywhere and at anytime has made the situation far more complex. As a result broadband resources are exposed to various kinds of security attacks, particularly DoS attacks

Generic Continuity of Operations/Continuity of Government Plan for State-Level Transportation Agencies, Research Report 11-01

The Homeland Security Presidential Directive 20 (HSPD-20) requires all local, state, tribal and territorial government agencies, and private sector owners of critical infrastructure and key resources (CI/KR) to create a Continuity of Operations/Continuity of Government Plan (COOP/COG). There is planning and training guidance for generic transportation agency COOP/COG work, and the Transportation Research Board has offered guidance for transportation organizations. However, the special concerns of the state-level transportation agency’s (State DOT’s) plan development are not included, notably the responsibilities for the entire State Highway System and the responsibility to support specific essential functions related to the State DOT Director’s role in the Governor’s cabinet. There is also no guidance on where the COOP/COG planning and organizing fits into the National Incident Management System (NIMS) at the local or state-level department or agency. This report covers the research conducted to determine how to integrate COOP/COG into the overall NIMS approach to emergency management, including a connection between the emergency operations center (EOC) and the COOP/COG activity. The first section is a presentation of the research and its findings and analysis. The second section provides training for the EOC staff of a state-level transportation agency, using a hybrid model of FEMA’s ICS and ESF approaches, including a complete set of EOC position checklists, and other training support material. The third section provides training for the COOP/COG Branch staff of a state-level transportation agency, including a set of personnel position descriptions for the COOP/COG Branch members

MusA: Using Indoor Positioning and Navigation to Enhance Cultural Experiences in a museum

In recent years there has been a growing interest into the use of multimedia mobile guides in museum environments. Mobile devices have the capabilities to detect the user context and to provide pieces of information suitable to help visitors discovering and following the logical and emotional connections that develop during the visit. In this scenario, location based services (LBS) currently represent an asset, and the choice of the technology to determine users' position, combined with the definition of methods that can effectively convey information, become key issues in the design process. In this work, we present MusA (Museum Assistant), a general framework for the development of multimedia interactive guides for mobile devices. Its main feature is a vision-based indoor positioning system that allows the provision of several LBS, from way-finding to the contextualized communication of cultural contents, aimed at providing a meaningful exploration of exhibits according to visitors' personal interest and curiosity. Starting from the thorough description of the system architecture, the article presents the implementation of two mobile guides, developed to respectively address adults and children, and discusses the evaluation of the user experience and the visitors' appreciation of these application