Abstract: Disaster recovery in urban environments is a complex process. Because of high population densities and the presence of many societal and infrastructural dependencies, urban areas are prone to severe loss of self-reliance in case of a disaster. Rebuilding such areas to a self-sustaining state is a daunting task, and requires a high degree of community effort and comprehensive knowledge about the affected environment. All too often, these requirements are not properly met, leading to a long recovery trajectory and misalignments between recovery efforts and community needs. We suggest that most issues in disaster recovery stem from 'collaboration gaps': Flawed organisational structures between stakeholder parties that exist between levels of operation and between phases in the recovery process. We introduce two innovation pathways to close these gaps, and present the COBACORE project that will explore these pathways, and create a collaborative platform for effective community-based comprehensive disaster recovery.

Abstract: In order to coordinate emergency operations and evacuations, it is vital to accurately assess damage to people, property, and the environment. For decades remote sensing has been used to observe the Earth from air, space and ground based sensors. These sensors collect massive amounts of dynamic and geographically distributed spatiotemporal data every day. However, despite the immense quantity of data available, gaps are often present due to the specific limitations of the sensors or their carrier platforms. This article illustrates how nonauthoritative data such as social media, news, tweets, and mobile phone data can be used to fill in these gaps. Two case studies are presented which employ non-authoritative data to fill in the gaps for improved situational awareness during damage assessments and emergency evacuations.

Abstract: This paper advances a growing body of mobile mapping work which captures building scale tornado damage in order to reveal vulnerabilities, or protections, within an otherwise apparently homogenous damage path. The hope is to find how micro geography, or built environment structure patterning might lead to policy advances with regards to rebuilding of critical infrastructure in tornado prone areas. This paper will use spatially encoded video to record damage patterns for the Washington, Illinois tornado of November 17, 2013. What makes this event notable is the location and time of year which can be considered outside the norm. Individual building damage data are coded using the Tornado Injury Scale (TIS) and then analyzed using two forms of local area spatial analysis – a Getis-Ord (Gi) z-score analysis to identify hotspots of damage, and a Local Moran's I to identify building outliers within hotspots.

Abstract: Natural disasters often leave profound impacts on the environment. Existing disaster impact assessment methods fall short in facilitating the relief work and in conducting cross-sectional comparison of various facets of such impacts. The development of a standardized index for measuring/monitoring the environmental impacts of disasters is necessary to address this gap. This paper proposes a conceptual framework to study the environmental impacts via remote sensing/GIS based geospatial analytical approach by developing a post-disaster environmental severity index. It considers physical, social and built-in components of the environment and identifies several key indicators of disaster impacts. Through statistical decomposition of a large number of environmental impact indicators, the study proposes a composite post-disaster environmental severity index (PDESI). Mapping of the proposed index would help identification of areas and component of the environment that are severely affected by a disaster, and formulation of disaster mitigation and damage recovery plans accordingly.

Abstract: Decision-making has been a subject actively investigated in several areas of knowledge such as Philosophy, Economics, Psychology, Computer Science, among others. This paper explores the potential opportunities offered by two methodologies to assess the team decision-making at the end of a simulated exercise (training). We present a case study showing how to measure the team decision-making combining both methodologies to assess a team of three experienced Officers from the Military Fire Brigade of the State of Rio de Janeiro. The simulated exercise was carried out within the Integrated Center of Command and Control of Rio de Janeiro. We intend this study provide a pathway that can be helpful in reducing the subjectivity generated during the observation of the team decision-making in Emergency Management environments.

Abstract: Agro Terrorism is “a hostile attack, towards an agricultural environment, including infrastructures and processes, in order to significantly damage national and international political interests”. This special session within the early warning track is aimed at reducing agro-terrorism related risks by either means of prevention (intelligence gathering using data mining and chatter mining, for example) or means to response to such an attack by early detection of exotic/foreign pathogenic agents, early prediction of disease dispersion patterns, implementation of biosecurity measures, and the development of future methodologies and techniques related to food defense and post-event response. This paper focuses on intention detection using overt data sources on the World Wide Web as they relate to agro-terrorism threats. The paper focuses on early detection that can lead to prevention of such acts, yet a variety of the techniques presented here are also useful for helping in post-event perpetrators detection. © 2012 ISCRAM.

Abstract: Sigmah is free software for the integrated management of humanitarian projects. It provides international aid organization with the following software features:-Monitoring project progress and funding;-Creating, sharing, analysing and mapping indicators, for monitoring and assessment;-Centralising project documents;-Improving schedule management and early-warning alarms for events;-Implementing a quality assurance approach, by defining criteria and critical points linked to projects. The Sigmah project is led by a group of humanitarian organizations, which has, at the time of writing, 12 members: Action Against Hunger (France), Aide Médicale Internationale, Comité dAide Médicale, Comité de Secours Internationaux, French Red Cross, Groupe Urgence Réhabilitation Développement (Groupe URD), Handicap International (France), Islamic Relief (France), Médecins du Monde, Première Urgence, Solidarités International and Triangle Génération Humanitaire. Sigmah is developed as free software because it aims to be available to the humanitarian community as a whole.

Abstract: What role should operational risk leaders have in the executive suite? This paper argues that, when nervous CEOs ask “What can go wrong? How can we get ahead of the curve?”, they should look to their operational risk leaders. Those leaders oversee corporate and information security as well as business continuity, crisis management and disaster recovery programs inside companies. That makes them ideally qualified to take the process of crisis management, including analysis of aggregate risk across all silos – To the CEO and then into the boardroom when the need arises, before the corporate crisis is full-blown.

Abstract: In a crisis with casualties, while there is no medical intervention, the severity of the injuries increases, and some people may die. Since the number of rescuers is limited, it is necessary to perform a planning and a deployment of this resource on the basis of a risk criterion illustrating the potential increase of the number of casualties at each point of the concerned area. Emergency planning is still a poorly developed science [3]. This paper provides a dynamical model for the number of casualties, inspired from the Verhulst model classically used for biological systems [5], to evaluate this risk criterion as a function of future time. It calculates the evolution of the number of unrescued casualties, the number of dead people, and the number of rescued people, as a function of the number of rescuers. Numerical results are shown.

Abstract: This abstract highlights research challenges to improving effectiveness of integrating information and communication technologies during emergencies. Proposed as a research focus is the integration of proven virtual activation processes with an unobtrusive research presence. This positions the research presence during a real-time emergency to glean previously unknown information/rationales on how decision-makers decide and take action. Establishing a collaborative partnership by combining a ?research presence? with the ?virtual operation capability,? is essential. Mutual understanding must embrace the precept of no disruption to first responders in actual response and recovery efforts. Consensus should be reached in identifying measurable outcomes for the research. The collaborative effort opens a groundbreaking area for consideration of study in crisis response and management. It would shed new light on an underexplored, critical area of emergency management and has the potential to further enhance the value of information and communication systems in preparing, responding, and recovering from emergencies.

Abstract: Emergency planning is an ongoing activity in which a multidisciplinary group of experts intermittently collaborate to define the most appropriate response to risks. One of the most important tasks of emergency planning is risk reduction. Such a task compiles the analysis of capabilities to face an emergency, the prioritizing of activities, and the definition of procedures and strategies. It is therefore a reflection process based on exchanging information between planners and exploring alternatives. Despite the exploration of alternatives is an especially relevant activity to design better plans, recent research on computer-mediated collaborative tools for planning do not usually offer support for this activity. Thus, with the purpose of supporting reflection during the development of risk reduction tasks, this paper presents an exploratory design tool that allow planners to assess the space of alternatives and the underlying information related those alternatives. This planning tool will help planners to examine and contextualize information, allowing them to define more suitable response strategies.

Abstract: Concepts such as trust, shared understanding, cultural differences, mental workload, and organizational structure all impact upon the effectiveness of an organization (e.g., Tindale & Kameda, 2000), and even more so in the context of large scale multinational operations (e.g, Smith, Granlund, & Lindgen, 2010). In order to study these concepts we plan a multinational, distributed experiment with participants from three nations collaborating in the same virtual environment: Canadian, British, and Swedish participants will work together as part of a multinational MTS to deal with a complex task and gain control of a crisis situation. Empirical research on MTS remains limited (see, e.g., DeChurch & Marks, 2006) particularly at the multinational level where the investigation of MTS has been so far focused on case studies and exercises (e.g., Goodwin, Essens, & Smith, 2012). Therefore, there is a need to empirically study multinational MTS in order to assess the specific issues that multinational operations face, notably cultural and languages differences. The simulation environment used as experimental platform for this project is C3Fire (www.c3fire.org, Granlund & Granlund, 2011). C3Fire creates an environment whereby teams must work together to resolve a crisis in the firefighting domain, with the goal of evacuating people in critical areas, putting out the forest fire, and protecting buildings and other areas of value from the burning forest fire. This platform makes it possible to study participants' collaborative processes when dealing with a set of crisis scenarios in the context of a simulated emergency response situation. To deal efficiently with the crisis management operation, participants need to prioritize between different objectives, identify and protect critical areas, and plan and implement activities based on given resources. All these tasks are distributed between team members, compelling participants to exchange information and coordinate within and between teams to execute the task. The task is divided into three areas of responsibility as follows: 1) Information and Planning, responsible for situation assessment and providing the operating picture; 2) Operation and Logistic, responsible for intervention and resource management; and 3) Search and Rescue, responsible for research and management of civilians. C3Fire is designed to: 1) achieve an optimal compromise between internal and external validity; 2) show flexibility in scenario configuration (spectrum of units and roles – including search and rescue functions; Tremblay et al., 2010), allowing researchers to capture emergency response and crisis management and rapid response planning; 3) be highly configurable for testing many different types of teams (e.g., hierarchical vs. horizontal organizations); and 4) readily provide objective, non-intrusive metrics for assessing teamwork effectiveness (including macrocognitive functions and team processes) as well as quantitative measures of task performance (that take into account conflicting mission goals). © 2012 ISCRAM.

Abstract: Crisis organisations depend on telecommunication services; unavailability of these services reduces the effectiveness of crisis response. Crisis organisations should therefore be aware of availability risks, and need a suitable risk assessment method. Such a method needs to be aware of the exceptional circumstances in which crisis organisations operate, and of the commercial structure of modern telecom services. We found that existing risk assessment methods are unsuitable for this problem domain. Hence, crisis organisations do not perform any risk assessment, trust their supplier, or rely on service level agreements, which are not meaningful during crisis situations. We have therefore developed a new risk assessment method, which we call RASTER. We have tested RASTER using a case study at the crisis organisation of a government agency, and improved the method based on the analysis of case results. Our initial validation suggests that the method can yield practical results. © 2012 ISCRAM.