On the direct and indirect effects of the Great East Japan earthquake on self rated health through social connections: Mediation analysis

The Great East Japan Earthquake created health hazards for many people. Using Panel Data gathered in Iwanuma city, Japan, at two points in time (in 2010 before the quake, and in 2013 after the quake), we found that the high degree of housing damage negatively affected victims’ self rated health (SRH) (direct effect), and decreased the levels of their social connections, which in turn also had a harmful effect on their SRH (indirect effect). We also found that although the direct impacts of earthquakes disappear relatively quickly, the harmful indirect effects associated with a decrease in social connections are slower to dissipate. We conducted a first-difference two-step GMM estimation to consider the possible problem of endogeneity. The results support the above conclusion, and show that in the short-term, the indirect impacts of the earthquake accounted for 55 % of all the impacts experienced.     

Relief aid stocking decisions under bilateral agency cooperation

We aim to quantify the benefits of cooperation between humanitarian relief agencies in terms of stocking decisions. We consider two agencies that stock the same type of relief item at different locations prone to individual disaster risks and agree to transship the shortage amount from available stocks in case of a disaster. We incorporate the disaster risk to the Newsvendor model by conditioning the stock quantity decisions on the event that a major disaster occurs within the lifetime of the stocked relief item. We optimize the stock quantity for each agency in response to the other's quantity and compute a Nash Equilibrium solution numerically. We apply this game theoretic approach to the case of earthquake preparedness in Istanbul to optimize the stocking decisions of an agency for shelter units in cooperation with another agency. We investigate the characteristics of the solutions under various parameter settings and identify cases in which cooperation may be beneficial to one or both of the agencies.     

Landslide risk perception survey in Angra dos Reis (Rio de Janeiro,southeastern Brazil): A contribution to support planning of non structural measures

The increasing magnitude and frequency of landslide-related disasters exposes weaknesses in disaster risk reduction (DRR) policy. One of the underlying reasons is that DRR policies tend to focus only on the physical aspects of the problem (i.e. mass movement processes) while neglecting the level of vulnerability of exposed populations to landslide threats, which affects the types and magnitude of adverse consequences. This neglect is a typical symptom of the remoteness that can exist between public administrators and local communities and undermines the implementation of participatory risk management. Certain dimensions of vulnerability depend on how communities relate to the issue of disasters based on their intuitive or rational judgment, i.e. their perception of risk. This paper seeks to shed light on the need for an understanding of risk perception based on the findings from a survey of residents in the city of Angra dos Reis, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to be taken into account in aiming at a more efficient landslide risk management policy. The survey was carried out through semi-structured face-to-face interviews with residents of three typical hillside communities in this municipality. In general, the study found that residents will often weigh landslide risks against other threats and opportunities existing where they live. It also found that community members find it difficult to see themselves as agents of change in the environment where they live and in mitigating landslide risks, and that better communication is needed between the government agencies involved in risk management and local residents.     

How much could refuges help us recover from a global catastrophe?

Some global catastrophes (such as nuclear wars, pandemics, or an asteroid collision) might destroy civilization. Some propose building well-stocked shelters constantly staffed with people trained to rebuild civilization in such cases. These “refuges” would have an unimpressive expected cost per life saved, but could conceivably have an impressive expected cost per future generation allowed to exist. From some ethical perspectives that highly value future generations, building refuges may therefore seem like a promising idea. However, several factors significantly dilute the potential impact of refuges, even if the proposed catastrophes occur. Government/private disaster shelters, people working on submarines, and isolated peoples who prefer to be left alone serve these purposes to some extent already. Many proposed catastrophes do too much/too little damage for refuges to help, affect the environment in ways that make refuges largely irrelevant, or otherwise give relatively limited advantages to the people in refuges. In global food crises or social collapse scenarios, refuges would add little to aggregate stocks of population, resources, food, and relevant skills; but they may add something unique in terms of isolation and coordination. These potential benefits of refuges seem the most promising, and may be worthy of further analysis.     

Planning the delivery of relief supplies upon the occurrence of a natural disaster while considering the assembly process of the relief kits

Models for the distribution of relief supplies often assume immediate availability of relief items upon the occurrence of a natural disaster. However, such an assumption does not always apply in realistic settings. In some cases, at least it is necessary to assemble relief items into kits before distributing them among the affected population. This paper presents a rolling horizon methodology that considers dynamic parameters such as demand, capacities and demand priorities for the problem of distributing relief supplies after the occurrence of a natural disaster by including such assembling activities before the delivery.     

Stochastic optimization for investment in facilities in emergency prevention

A coordinated approach is developed to integrate three preventive measures (i.e. building reinforcement, reinforcement of road networks, and facility location of relief supplies), with the objectives of minimizing budgets and risk-induced penalties. The Conditional Value-at-Risk is employed as a decision-making tool to evaluate diverse decisions of prevention based on the degree of risk aversion. Based on a real-world case of an earthquake, a series of scenarios were designed, and the applicability of the proposed model was studied. The coordinated approach for investing preventive measures is cost-efficient in helping reduce the impact of disaster on society.     

Arc routing problems to restore connectivity of a road network

After a disaster, restoring accessibility in the affected area is critical for response operations. We study two arc routing problems for clearing blocked roads. The first problem minimizes the time to reconnect the road network, while the second maximizes the total benefit gained by reconnecting network components within a time limit. For each problem, we develop a mixed integer programming formulation and two versions of a heuristic algorithm. We conduct computational experiments on Istanbul data and instances adapted from the literature. The heuristics achieve near-optimal or optimal solutions quickly in most of the tested instances.     

A Generalized Nash Equilibrium network model for post-disaster humanitarian relief

We develop a Generalized Nash Equilibrium network model for post-disaster humanitarian relief by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). NGOs derive utility from providing relief supplies to victims of the disaster at demand points in a supply chain context while competing with each other for financial funds provided by donations. The shared constraints consist of lower and upper bounds for demand for relief items at the demand points to reduce materiel convergence or congestion. This game theory problem is reformulated as an optimization problem and numerical examples and a theoretical case study on Hurricane Katrina given.     

Effective and equitable supply of gasoline to impacted areas in the aftermath of a natural disaster

The focus of this research is on supplying gasoline after a natural disaster. There are two aspects for this work: determination of which gas stations should be provided with generators (among those that do not have electric power) and determination of a delivery scheme that accounts for increased demand due to lack of public transportation and considerations such as equity. We develop a mixed integer program for this situation. Two case studies based on Hurricane Sandy in New Jersey are developed and solved in CPLEX. As expected, increasing equity increases cost and also tends to place generators to stations with large initial inventories. It is further observed that CPLEX can solve the largest instances of the problem for a 5% tolerance gap, indicating that the model is efficient.     

城市灾害应急预案基本要素探讨

目前,城市灾害管理正在逐渐受到各级政府的重视,为了有效地减轻城市灾害的损失,一些大中城市开始制定灾害应急预案.然而,在应该制定什么样的城市应急预案才能真正在救灾抢险中发挥最大作用等方面仍缺少必要的论证和探讨.文章从政府灾害应急救灾的基本程序入手,对城市灾害应急预案的基本要素进行了探讨,提出了城市灾害预测评价和防灾规划是制定城市灾害应急预案的基础,而灾害应急指挥系统、灾害情报体系、救灾抢险体系、应急医疗体系、应急避难体系和交通管理体系六大主要因素构成了城市灾害应急预案的基本要素.