Regional Health and Public Health Preparedness for Nuclear Terrorism: Optimizing Survival in a Low Probability/High Consequence Disaster

The United States remains unprepared to cope with the possibility of an attack on a major city by terrorists capable of acquiring and detonating an improvised nuclear device. Long-held anxieties about the non-survivability of nuclear war promulgated during the intense U.S.—Soviet arms race from the late 1940s through the 1980s, and reluctance to consider low probability/high consequence events among local disaster planning priorities, are barriers to developing plans that could dramatically save lives in the event of a terrorist-based nuclear detonation. This paper begins by describing the reality of the threat of nuclear terrorism to the United States and the enormous scale of lives lost and physical destruction that would result from the detonation of even a small improvised nuclear device (IND) in an American city. It then systematically lays out the gross inadequacy of current response capabilities, and highlights the critical unmet need for urgent, deliberate and well-funded planning efforts to address those deficiencies. In the Recommendations section, Columbia University‘s National Center for Disaster Preparedness (NCDP) calls for targeted public health and medical care regional planning and response efforts focused on “gray zones“—areas where significant life-saving opportunities would exist following an IND detonation, and where preparedness planning and proper training can meaningfully enhance survival and recovery

The impact of Mean Time Between Disasters on inventory pre-positioning strategy

Purpose - This paper addresses the impact of Mean Time Between Disasters (MTBD) to inventory pre-positioning strategy of medical supplies prior to a sudden-onset disaster

Port stakeholder perceptions of Sandy impacts: a case study of Red Hook, New York

Understanding the impacts of coastal storm hazards on all maritime port system stakeholders (e.g. operators, tenants, clients, workers, communities, governments) is essential to comprehensive climate change resilience planning. While direct damages and indirect impacts are quantifiable through economic data and modeling, qualitative data on the intangible consequences of storms are necessary to explicate interdependencies between stakeholders as well as conditions that substantially affect response and recovery capacities. This case study explores Hurricane Sandy storm impacts using evidence solicited from stakeholder representatives and extracted from contemporaneous and technical accounts of storm impacts on the port system at Red Hook Container Terminal, Brooklyn, New York, USA. Results highlight the wide range of direct damages, indirect costs, and intangible consequences impacting stakeholders across institutional boundaries and requiring coordination for recovery, providing insight into stakeholder relationships and dependencies in the post-disaster response and recovery process that are often not fully accounted for in current vulnerability assessment and response planning methodologies

The Impacts of Increased Adverse Weather Events on Freight Movement

Freight transportation is a major economic backbone of the United States and is vital to sustaining the nation’s economic growth. Ports, as one of the primary components of freight transportation and important means of integrating into the global economic system, have experienced significant growth and increased capacity during the past two decades. The study addresses an important national freight mobility goal to enhance the resilience of the port transportation operations in the event of extreme weather events. This study develops an adaptable resilience assessment framework that evaluates the impact of a disruptive event on transportation operations. The framework identifies dynamic performance levels over an extended period of an event including five distinct phases of responses- staging, reduction, peak, restoration, and overloading. This study applies the framework to the port complex in Houston, Texas, during a major hurricane event, Harvey, and two holiday events in 2017. The framework evaluates proactive and reactive responses of port truck activities during the disruptions and provides a comprehensive assessment of resilience and adaptability in port truck operations. Evaluating response systems and resilience of port truck activities during severe weather events such as Hurricane Harvey represents the first step for designing plans that support a fast system recovery that minimizes the economic, social, and human impacts

Insurer Climate Risk Disclosure Survey: 2012 Findings and Recommendations

2012 was the warmest year on record in the Lower 48 states and the second most extreme weather year in U.S. history. This is not a coincidence. Extreme weather -- stronger, more damaging storms, unprecedented drought and heat in some regions and unprecedented rainfall and flooding in others -- are the predictable consequences of rising global temperatures.Eleven extreme weather events each caused at least a billion dollars in losses last year in the United States. A single event, Hurricane Sandy, caused more than $50 billion in economic losses. Insurance companies are on the hook for tens of billions of dollars in claims as a result of Sandy and other severe weather events. And American taxpayers are on the hook for tens of billions of dollars themselves, thanks to losses sustained by the National Flood Insurance Program as well as disaster relief spendingThis raises a fundamental question: Is the insurance industry prepared? Have insurers analyzed and measured their climate-related risk? Are they planning for life in a warmer world? These should be essential questions for insurance regulators in all 50 states to be asking, and some are

Methodology for Quantifying Resiliency of Transportation Systems

The National Science Foundation’s definition of resiliency is “the ability to prepare and plan for, absorb, recover from, or more successfully adapt to actual or potential adverse events” (National Science Foundation, 2016). While this definition is informative and useful, it lacks a quantitative reference. There is a need for a method of quantifying resilience to better plan and prepare for system wide disruptions. The research effort described herein provides a quantifiable measures of system resiliency, consistent with NSF’s definition. Fundamentally, a system disruption can be partitioned into five distinctive states: the stable pre-event state, the absorption state, the disrupted state, the recovered state, and stable recovered state. The proposed method identifies these states by measuring system output and quantifies each component on a value scale between zero and one. The resiliency measure then unifies these metrics to provide an overall assessment of resiliency, which accounts for the system’s ability to absorb, recover, and adapt. This approach to quantifying resiliency is applicable to any real-world or simulated system with measureable outputs. This paper first documents the development of the resiliency quantification method and then applies the method toward four complex, real world, transportation systems undergoing disruptions. These case studies consisted of six maritime port, three airports, two localized refueling systems, and the Colorado Department of Transportation’s cyber network. Each system had a measurable drop in functionality due to a disruption. In general the results of this research showed that the proposed method of quantifying resiliency can be utilized for any transportation system

Humanitarian Logistics: Shipping Designs for the Post Disaster Cargo Surge

In 2017 Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico. The humanitarian aid community scrambled a response to support the 3.4 million people affected by the disaster. In response, thousands of shipping containers filled with supplies were sent to the island. Numerous reports surfaced regarding significant delays in receiving the shipments. This research reviews the historical account of cargo throughput into Puerto Rico following Maria. A computer simulation built in ARENA compares various what-if scenarios based on empirically collected data and interviews with FEMA, port authorities, and commercial cargo carriers to determine how the humanitarian supply chain could improve for future disaster planning. An additional goal of this research is to better inform humanitarian logisticians who must balance near-term disaster response demands with long term recovery concerns

Daily and monthly costs of terrorism on Pakistani exports

This is first of its kind empirical study on the costs of terrorism on Pakistan’s exports. The analysis finds that intensity of terrorist activity can be divided into three distinct periods. The LAL Masjid incident in mid 2007 marks the first sign of intensification of terrorism in Pakistan. The second one is the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. The third one comes in 2008 when the US announced to shift gear from Iraq to Afghanistan and incumbent government in Pakistan created a political support for armed action within Pakistani borders against the terrorists. The analysis finds that terrorism has more significant affect on Pakistani exports post Benazir assassination. The report calculates the monthly and daily costs of terrorism. On average there are 2 terrorist attacks every day whereas 5 citizens on average die in these attacks. A single terrorist attack costs 12 million dollars to the exports. Post Benazir assassination the costs rise to 18 million dollars due to increased intensity where not only the death toll on average has risen but the number of terrorist attacks have gone up. Average per month loss in exports due to terrorism is calculated to be around 500 million dollars. Pakistan in 2006-09 has lost nearly 30 billion dollars in exports as its market shares have fallen. Part of this loss is explained by terrorism, where we find that 18 billion dollars accounts for it. Please note that extending the data for later years may make our results more pronounced but suffice to say our calculated β’s are robust capable of predicting terrorism for coming years. For example, it is found out that costs of number of deaths and number of injured are different while exports are more sensitive to the former capturing severity of casualties that is the hall mark of extreme terrorist actions like suicide attacks.Conflict, Trade

Disruption Response Support For Inland Waterway Transportation

Motivated by the critical role of the inland waterways in the United States\u27 transportation system, this dissertation research focuses on pre- and post- disruption response support when the inland waterway navigation system is disrupted by a natural or manmade event. Following a comprehensive literature review, four research contributions are achieved. The first research contribution formulates and solves a cargo prioritization and terminal allocation problem (CPTAP) that minimizes total value loss of the disrupted barge cargoes on the inland waterway transportation system. It is tailored for maritime transportation stakeholders whose disaster response plans seek to mitigate negative economic and societal impacts. A genetic algorithm (GA)-based heuristic is developed and tested to solve realistically-sized instances of CPTAP. The second research contribution develops and examines a tabu search (TS) heuristic as an improved solution approach to CPTAP. Different from GA\u27s population search approach, the TS heuristic uses the local search to find improved solutions to CPTAP in less computation time. The third research contribution assesses cargo value decreasing rates (CVDRs) through a Value-focused Thinking based methodology. The CVDR is a vital parameter to the general cargo prioritization modeling as well as specifically for the CPTAP model for inland waterways developed here. The fourth research contribution develops a multi-attribute decision model based on the Analytic Hierarchy Process that integrates tangible and intangible factors in prioritizing cargo after an inland waterway disruption. This contribution allows for consideration of subjective, qualitative attributes in addition to the pure quantitative CPTAP approach explored in the first two research contributions