Digital Commons Network^™

Volunteer Preparedness For Emergency Management At Festivals, Debbie Toluwanimi Olotu, Christine Van Winkle Phd

TTRA Canada 2023 Conference

This research provides insight into emergency preparedness and Management at Festivals. The study aims to enhance practice, advance theory and contribute to safe and secure event management, reducing risks for communities and event attendees. By using a service-dominant logic (SDL) framework, the study provided insight into the role of a festival stakeholder group, volunteers, and their contributions to emergency management.

Emergency And Disaster Management Requires Complex Systems Thinking And Practices, Larry M. Starr, Phd

School of Business Faculty Papers

There are two broad classes of challenges (problems and opportunities) that may be addressed by educators in the academic and practice domain of Emergency and Disaster Management (EDM). Graduate education programs should acknowledge both kinds when formulating and presenting curricula and courses. However, the conventional approach is to treat all problems as part of a single type as if there is a one-size-fits-all premise underpinning how to think about, frame, decide, respond, and follow-up to EDM problems. I argue that a second conceptualization of EDM challenges should be formally acknowledged and added. I also argue that to adequately appreciate the …

Perspectives From Frontline Organizations In The Portland Metro Region On Addressing Food Insecurity During The Covid-19 Pandemic, Megan Horst, Meg Grzybowski, Huijun Tan

Institute of Portland Metropolitan Studies Publications

See video of related event: https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/metropolitianstudies/155/

The main goal of this project was to contribute to an understanding of how frontline-serving food security organizations in the Portland region adapted during the COVID-19 pandemic and other emergencies in 2020-2022 and how they addressed increased rates of food insecurity among the region’s residents. We discuss the experiences of these organizations in serving the region’s food insecure residents, the many adaptations they made in the past few years, barriers experienced, and positive and critical reflections on local government. We identify lessons learned and promising ideas for how to better prepare our region, in …

Dental Hygiene And Dental Assistant Students' Simulated Dvi Radiographic Match Accuracy: A Pilot Study, Samantha C. Vest, Brenda T. Bradshaw, Marsha A. Voelker, Ann M. Bruhn, Tara L. Newcomb, Sinjini Sikdar

Dental Hygiene Faculty Publications

Purpose Allied dental health care professionals have served on disaster victim identification (DVI) teams; however, the literature is void of statistical measures regarding transferable skills and disaster preparedness. The purpose of this study was to assess second year dental hygiene and dental assistant students’ match accuracy for simulated DVI radiographs and compare the match accuracy between the student groups.

Methods Five patient cases were chosen at random to retrospectively collect sets of digital bitewing radiographs from two time periods. The five retrospectively selected sets of images served as simulated antemortem (AM) and postmortem (PM) radiographs. A convenience sample of second …

Implementation Of A Medical Emergency Chain Of Command Protocol In The School Setting, Vikki Shannon Brannon

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

Medical emergencies occur every day in school settings across America. School nurses have a vital role in providing care for individuals experiencing a medical emergency and leading a multidisciplinary team during a medical emergency event. Since incidences of medical emergencies are commonplace, it is standard to have protocols and guidelines for these events. To address this concern, an evidence-based practice project was implemented in a rural school district in North Georgia. The pilot project was developed and implemented to assess the effectiveness of implementing a “Medical Emergency Chain of Command Protocol.” The protocol was developed to improve the effectiveness and …

Best Practices In Disaster Public Communications: Evacuation Alerting And Social Media, Frannie Edwards, Kaikai Liu, Amanda Lee Hughes, Jerry Zeyo Gao, Dan Goodrich, Alan Barner, Robert Herrera

Mineta Transportation Institute

This research project examines the current state of the practice for disaster public communication, the distrust of government, the training available to public information officers, and the literature available to guide the design of effective public outreach messaging, especially for rapid on-set events. Growing distrust in government had led to lack of public confidence in public agency messaging during emergencies, yet public agency public information officers are using multiple pathways, including both traditional and social media resources, to try to reach impacted communities effectively. The introduction explains the development of wildfire events in the West and their context. A literature …

Newsletter, Fall 2022

Newsletter

No abstract provided.

Lessons Learned From The 2019 Nebraska Floods: Implications For Emergency Management, Mass Care, And Food Security, Eric E. Calloway, Nadine B. Nugent, Katie L. Stern, Ashley Mueller, Amy L. Yaroch

Nebraska Extension: Faculty and Staff Publications

This qualitative study aimed to understand the actions, challenges, and lessons learned for addressing the food and water needs of flood survivors, with a special focus on vulnerable populations and the implications for food security, to inform future disaster response efforts in the U.S. Semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted from January to August 2020 with the local, state, and national stakeholders (n = 27) involved in the disaster response to the 2019 Nebraska floods, particularly those involved in providing mass care, such as food, water, and shelter, for the flood survivors. The challenge themes were related to limited risk …

A Simulation–Optimization Framework For Post-Disaster Allocation Of Mental Health Resources, Stephen Cunningham, Steven J. Schuldt, Christopher M. Chini, Justin D. Delorit

Faculty Publications

Extreme events, such as natural or human-caused disasters, cause mental health stress in affected communities. While the severity of these outcomes varies based on socioeconomic standing, age group, and degree of exposure, disaster planners can mitigate potential stress-induced mental health outcomes by assessing the capacity and scalability of early, intermediate, and long-term treatment interventions by social workers and psychologists. However, local and state authorities are typically underfunded, understaffed, and have ongoing health and social service obligations that constrain mitigation and response activities. In this research, a resource assignment framework is developed as a coupled-state transition and linear optimization model that …

Whole-Community Response Planning For Pennsylvania’S Ongoing Opioid Emergency, Alexander Siedschlag

Publications

The Penn State Center for Security Research and Education (CSRE), in collaboration with Penn State Homeland Security Programs and the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency (PEMA), held a tabletop exercise that addressed first-responder and whole-community response and resilience to the ongoing opioid crisis. The exercise, which took place Sept. 24, 2019, at PEMA headquarters in Harrisburg, Pa., also was supported by the Governor’s Office for Homeland Security and the Pennsylvania Department of Health’s Bureau of Public Health Preparedness. The Dickinson School of Law and Immaculata University were academic contributors. This article summarizes the main outcome in the current COVID-19 context.

High Reliability Collaborations: Theorizing Interorganizational Reliability As Constituted Through Translation, Rebecca M. Rice

Communication Studies Faculty Publications

High reliability organizations (HROs) need to collaborate to address risks that transcend organizational boundaries. HRO literature has yet to examine the challenge of creating interorganizational reliability, while collaboration literature can further explore how stakeholder priorities become dominant in collaborations. This study joins these bodies of literature to identify the growing domain of High Reliability Collaborations (HRCs). Drawing from 2 years of ethnographic research within a community emergency collaboration, the study theorizes that communicative translations constitute HRCs and serve to make sense of HROs and non-HROs as belonging to a shared collaborative framework. These translations are necessary to create reliability but …

Dealing With Disruption, Rethinking Recovery: Policy Responses To The Covid-19 Pandemic In Higher Education, Amira El Masri, Emma Sabzalieva

Publications and Scholarship

This paper examines policy responses in higher education in the months of March and April 2020 during the rapid unfolding of the COVID-19 pandemic. The purpose is to map responses and compare levels of coordination between three actors—the Canadian federal government, the Ontario provincial government, and Ontario’s publicly funded colleges and universities—and to consider the policy implications of these initial responses for higher education’s future recovery from the pandemic. Conceptualizing COVID-19 as both a wicked problem and, in the Canadian context, a complex intergovernmental problem, the paper draws on over 200 data points from public announcements made by these three …

“Go Hard, Go Early”: Preliminary Lessons From New Zealand’S Response To Covid-19, Thomas Jamieson

Public Administration Faculty Publications

Although the full impact of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic is yet to be realized, New Zealand has suffered comparatively less than other countries, and there were no active cases in the country by June 8, 2020. Building from best practices in emergency management research, several preliminary lessons emerge from the country’s response to the crisis that could be adapted for other settings. In particular, the government acted early and decisively, developed national unity to combat the virus, communicated effectively with the public, and adapted to changing circumstances, especially to address shortcomings in the response. These preliminary lessons provide some …

Strategic Planning In Emergency Management: Evaluating The Impacts On Local Program Quality, Scott Robert Manning

Research, Publications & Creative Work

This study examined the strategic planning practices of county-level emergency management agencies (EMAs), with a specific focus on strategic planning adoption and its relationship to local program quality. The study utilized a descriptive, cross-sectional survey design to collect planning- and programrelated data from more than 300 county-level EMAs across the United States. The study findings revealed that most of the county EMAs included in the final sample had previously engaged in strategic planning activities, with nearly all of them continuing to use strategic planning as part of their general management practice. The study findings further revealed that strategic planning had …

Trust In Emergency Management Authorities And Individual Emergency Preparedness For Tornadoes, Junghwa Choi

Public Administration Faculty Publications

The risks associated with disasters can be significantly reduced if individuals are well prepared according to the orders and recommendations of emergency management authorities such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and local government. Despite this fact, there is evidence that individuals are not cooperative with these authorities and are therefore underprepared for an emergency. This article argues that individual trust in emergency management authorities may affect their cooperation with emergency preparedness recommendations. Using unique survey data, this study finds a nuanced relationship between individual emergency preparedness for tornadoes and trust in emergency management authorities. Although trust in FEMA …

Exploring Crisis Communication And Information Dissemination On Social Media: Social Network Analysis Of Hurricane Irma Tweets, Xianlin Jin

Communication Graduate Research

This study utilized social network analysis to identify the top 10 Twitter influentials during the Hurricane Irma crisis period and examined the relationship between social media attributes and the bridge influence of controlling information flow. The number of a user’s followers and tweets significantly predicted one’s control of information. Crisis information tended to be shared in scattered subgroups. Social network boundaries impeded information diffusion, and the communication pattern was largely one-way. The findings partially supported the opinion leader argument while indicating that influentials can directly generate information, which is consistent with the social-mediated crisis communication model. Such findings will contribute …

Flood Detection Using Multi-Modal And Multi-Temporal Images: A Comparative Study, Kazi Aminul Islam, Mohammad Shahab Uddin, Chiman Kwan, Jiang Li

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Natural disasters such as flooding can severely affect human life and property. To provide rescue through an emergency response team, we need an accurate flooding assessment of the affected area after the event. Traditionally, it requires a lot of human resources to obtain an accurate estimation of a flooded area. In this paper, we compared several traditional machine-learning approaches for flood detection including multi-layer perceptron (MLP), support vector machine (SVM), deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) with recent domain adaptation-based approaches, based on a multi-modal and multi-temporal image dataset. Specifically, we used SPOT-5 and RADAR images from the flood event that …

Social And Geographical Disparities In Twitter Use During Hurricane Harvey, Lei Zou, Nina S.N. Lam, Shayan Shams, Heng Cai, Michelle A. Meyer, Seungwon Yang, Kisung Lee, Seung Jong Park, Margaret A. Reams

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

Social media such as Twitter is increasingly being used as an effective platform to observe human behaviors in disastrous events. However, uneven social media use among different groups of population in different regions could lead to biased consequences and affect disaster resilience. This paper studies the Twitter use during 2017 Hurricane Harvey in 76 counties in Texas and Louisiana. We seek to answer a fundamental question: did social-geographical disparities of Twitter use exist during the three phases of emergency management (preparedness, response, recovery)? We employed a Twitter data mining framework to process the data and calculate two indexes: Ratio and …

Federal Funding Programs: Benefit-Cost Analyses And Low To Moderate Income Communities, Kelsey Mcneill, Alyssa Glass

Virginia Coastal Policy Center

“Global average sea level has risen by about 7-8 inches (about 16-21cm) since 1990, with about 3 of those inches (about 7 cm) occurring since 1993.” Since both the ocean and the atmosphere are getting warmer, global sea levels are projected to rise at an increased rate over the coming centuries. Unsurprisingly, rise in sea level disproportionately negatively impacts coastal communities. For instance, a combination of high magnitude storms and sea level rise causes dangerous flooding to occur farther inland than in the past. Higher sea levels will also cause communities to flood more frequently around high tide even in …

Newsletter, Summer 2019

Newsletter

No abstract provided.

Fostering University Collaboration And Building Capacity To Respond To Coastal Resilience Challenges In Virginia: Findings From The Rotating Resilience Roundtables Workshop Spring 2019, Wie Yusuf, Michelle Covi, Anamaria Bukvic, Tom Allen, Taiwo Oguntuyo

Presentations, Lectures, Posters, Reports

[from Background and Overview]

Communities in coastal Virginia, particularly in the urban region of Hampton Roads and the rural Eastern Shore peninsula, are experiencing the impacts of climate change as part of everyday life. Among the most apparent impacts are sea level rise and associated flooding, but increasingly residents of the region are observing changing ecosystems, health impacts and complex social challenges are made more difficult. The region is experiencing the fastest rate of relative sea level rise on the U.S. east coast due to interactions between ocean currents, global sea level rise, high-water tables and ground subsidence (Adapt Virginia …

Planning For The "New Normal": Using Build One Portsmouth To Address Flood Resilience, Alison Wrynn, Sarah Simonetti

Virginia Coastal Policy Center

Sea level rise, recurrent flooding, and increasingly severe storms are ever-present threats to coastal Virginia. As climate change becomes the “new normal”, creative solutions are needed to adapt to these stark realities.

In response to these climate-related challenges, Governor Ralph Northam issued Executive Order 24, “Increasing Virginia’s Resilience to Sea Level Rise and Natural Hazards,” on November 2, 2018. The Executive Order designated the Secretary of Natural Resources as the Chief Resilience Officer of the Commonwealth, and set forth various actions intended to increase statewide resilience to natural hazards and extreme weather. Later that same month, Portsmouth released its 2018 …

Exploring Iso31000 Risk Management During Dynamic Fire And Emergency Operations In Western Australia, Greg Penney

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

Firefighting remains an inherently dangerous occupation with serious injuries and fatalities reported globally. The Australasian Fire Authorities Council adopt ISO31000 as the standard of risk management for all firefighting and mitigation operations. However, previous studies have reported that decisions made by incident controllers during dynamic emergencies are typically reactionary and only partially compliant with the ISO31000 process. This paper describes research using new qualitative and quantitative data that support incident controllers in managing risk during dynamic fire and emergency situations, in accordance with ISO31000. The research was completed through two studies. The first study explored risk attitudes of serving fire …

Equity In Emergency Management, Sabina Roan, Jaye Cromwell

Metroscape

In the decade following Hurricane Katrina, advocates fighting for the rights of people with disabilities changed the field of emergency management. Their pressure on FEMA led to the establishment of legal and planning precedents to include the needs of the whole community in emergency management.(4) There is now a national, legal requirement to plan for people with disabilities and access and functional needs. Despite this important victory for people with disabilities, there have been no direct legal or policy actions that address the disproportionate response along racial and socio-economic lines.

The theory of social equity has its roots in social …

Agent Based Model To Estimate Time To Restoration Of Storm-Induced Power Outages, Tara Walsh, Thomas Layton, David Wanik, Jonathan Mellor

Research, Publications & Creative Work

Extreme weather can cause severe damage and widespread power outages across utility service areas. The restoration process can be long and costly and emergency managers may have limited computational resources to optimize the restoration process. This study takes an agent based modeling (ABM) approach to optimize the utility storm recovery process in Connecticut. The ABM is able to replicate past storm recoveries and can test future case scenarios. We found that parameters such as the number of outages, repair time range and the number of utility crews working can substantially impact the estimated time to restoration (ETR). Other parameters such …

Assessing Relevance Of Tweets For Risk Communication, Xiaohui Liu, Bandana Kar, Chaoyang Zhang, David M. Cochran

Faculty Publications

Although Twitter is used for emergency management activities, the relevance of tweets during a hazard event is still open to debate. In this study, six different computational (i.e. Natural Language Processing) and spatiotemporal analytical approaches were implemented to assess the relevance of risk information extracted from tweets obtained during the 2013 Colorado flood event. Primarily, tweets containing information about the flooding events and its impacts were analysed. Examination of the relationships between tweet volume and its content with precipitation amount, damage extent, and official reports revealed that relevant tweets provided information about the event and its impacts rather than any …

Organizing Under Austerity: How Residents’ Concerns Became The Flint Water Crisis, Amy Krings, Dana Kornberg, Erin Lane

Social Work: School of Social Work Faculty Publications and Other Works

What might it take for politically marginalized residents to challenge cuts in public spending that threaten to harm their health and wellbeing? Specifically, how did residents of Flint, Michigan contribute to the decision of an austerity regime, which was not accountable to them, to spend millions to switch to a safe water source? Relying on evidence from key interviews and newspaper accounts, we examine the influence and limitations of residents and grassroots groups during the 18-month period between April 2014 and October 2015 when the city drew its water from the Flint River. We find that citizen complaints alone were …

Defining Extreme Events: A Cross-Disciplinary Review, Lauren E. Mcphillips, Heejun Chang, Mikhail Chester, Yaella Dipletri, Erin Friedman, Nancy B. Grimm, John S. Kominoski, Timon Mcphearson, Pablo Méndez-Lázaro, Emma J. Rosi, Javad Shafiei Shiva

Geography Faculty Publications and Presentations

Extreme events are of interest worldwide given their potential for substantial impacts on social, ecological, and technical systems. Many climate-related extreme events are increasing in frequency and/or magnitude due to anthropogenic climate change, and there is increased potential for impacts due to the location of urbanization and the expansion of urban centers and infrastructures. Many disciplines are engaged in research and management of these events. However, a lack of coherence exists in what constitutes and defines an extreme event across these fields, which impedes our ability to holistically understand and manage these events. Here, we review 10 years of academic …

The Cultural Competence Of Response & Recovery Workers In Post-Earthquake Haiti, Christa L. Remington

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Cultural competence is critical to public service, yet it is often ignored and underutilized, especially in post-disaster response and recovery. The current literature on cultural competence and frameworks developed by the private sector do not fully consider the complexities of a post-disaster public service context. This project explores the importance of cultural competence in post-disaster response and recovery, identifies effective training methods and organizational policies which may present barriers to competence acquisition, and proposes a new theoretical framework by which to assess cultural competence in international response and recovery work.

This study used focus groups with Haitian beneficiaries (n=7), in-depth …

Emergency Management Training For Transportation Agencies, Frances Edwards, Daniel Goodrich, James Griffith

Mineta Transportation Institute

State transportation agencies have a variety of responsibilities related to emergency management. Field personnel manage events--from day-to-day emergencies to disasters--using the Incident Command System (ICS) as their organizational basis. At the headquarters level, the Emergency Operations Center (EOC) coordinates the use of resources across the department and its districts, with other state departments and agencies, and through the federal Emergency Support Function 1. District-level EOCs coordinate with the department. In extreme events, the transportation department may only be able to deliver limited essential services in austere conditions, so a continuity of operations/ continuity of government plan (COOP/COG) is essential. This …