EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT
Year:2013 | Volume:2 | Issue:3|Papers Count:6

The expansion of many timeworn textures in old cities in addition to the troubles arising from unplanned urbanization threaten cities in Iran. Earthquakes are major hazards, which make a threat to these urbanizations. Cultural heritage sites in the cities are valuable whilst normally they do not have appropriate protection to improve their functional efficiency. Thus, it is of the utmost importance to pay special attention to them. Disaster management organizes the people’s responsibilities for dealing with all humanitarian aspects of emergencies. It helps urban planners manage resources and cover all aspects of emergency management such as preparedness, response and recovery. This paper aims to analyze seismic vulnerability by using indicators of historical textures. AHP method and the Expert Choice software have been used to assess the effects of these indicators in Fahadan neighborhood in Yazd. The vulnerability map of this area has been generated by using Geographic Information System (GIS). The results indicate high vulnerability in this area, especially in the northern and southern parts.

Loss of lives and properties caused by natural or man-made disasters, such as earthquake and fire, is a common issue. However, there are some buildings, which are more vulnerable to mentioned disasters due to the excessive number of residents and stories. Dormitories are highly vulnerable because not only they meet the above conditions, but also residents’ including students’ and employees’ lack of preparation and awareness about the ways of facing with danger increases their vulnerability. In this paper, dormitory of married students of Shahid Beheshti University has been selected. The organizational and non-structural vulnerabilities have been detected by applying a descriptive-analytical method. Firstly, the incident command system, solutions for risk mitigation of organizational and non-structural constructions in addition to some suggestions for preparing people to face with the disasters have been presented in accordance with the reference to disaster management theories and based on the data collected from the observations, questionnaires and interviews. Different measures are proposed based on adaptation of the dormitory organizational chart to incident command system diagram such as taking maneuvers, promoting safety culture, providing emergency evacuation plan and suggesting risk mitigation solutions for non-structural elements.

Nowadays, communities are more focused on rapid recovery and returning to pre-crisis status in the event of a crisis. Therefore special emphasis is being put on the notion of resilience instead of vulnerability. In this applied research, descriptive-analytical methods were used to identify the indicators affecting economic and institutional resiliency and to evaluate these indicators in the city of Tehran. After defining the indicators through library-based studies, their weights were calculated using a questionnaire answered by domestic and foreign specialists and AHP method. In the next stage a field study was carried out to gather the required information from the sample households and neighborhoods. And finally AHP and PROMETHE methods were used to rank the resilience of the sample neighborhoods. Results indicate that economic indicators of ‘Loss rate’ (0.383) and ‘Compensation capacity’ (0.281) have the highest weights while ‘Institutional efficiency’ (0.127) and ‘Ability to recover’ (0.104) are of medium importance and ‘Institutional context’ (0.056) and ‘Institutional relations’ (0.049) are the least significant indicators. Furthermore, based on PROMETHE method, Gheitarieh, Satarkhan, Narmak and Ghale Morghi were ranked as the first four neighborhoods in terms of economic and institutional resilience.

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the performance of local management and knowledge of local authorities in relation to the principles of disaster management and resilience building. The case study is the rural areas situated in the basins of Cheshmeh Kileh and Sardabrood, which are both tourist attractions and are experiencing significant investments in outdoor activities in the interest of tourism development. Contradictorily the area is faced with high risks of flood, for example, a flood in 2011 imposed a financial damage of estimated 500 billion Rials to the region. Descriptive-analytical methods were used in this applied research to evaluate the 10 principles of resilience management in the local level. The local authorities consisting of the members and chairmen of Islamic councils, district councils and village councils were chosen as the target group for this research. Using the existing literature on the subject of resilience and accounting for the geographical, social, cultural and economic state of the area, a questionnaire was designed and the data regarding the 10 principles was gathered. Results show that the condition of the studied sample is satisfactory in terms of ‘organization and coordination’, ‘management and protection of infrastructure’ and ‘land-use and building rules and regulation’. However in the case of the other 7 principles, the region needs more efficient planning.

Human beings are increasingly in danger of disasters, whether natural or man-made. Although these situations are not preventable, with a proper planning, the disaster can be controlled, and the damage can be reduced. One of the main issues in disaster management planning is the development of the response team. The aim of this paper is to introduce an approach that helps organizations develop a response team prior to disaster happen. In the proposed approach, the organization was viewed from a social network point of view. Analytic Hierarchy Process was employed and applied to the knowledge resource map. In order to illustrate the application of this approach it was applied to the Universiti Teknologi Malaysia on a random selected sample of population. In addition to disaster response team building, these maps can help managers in project management.

The purpose of this research is to assess the effects of organizational culture on knowledge sharing and agility in crisis management. The methodology of this paper is descriptive and survey methods, based on structural equation modeling, along with questionnaires were used to gather the required information. Reliability of the questionnaire was tested using Cronbach's alpha and the validity was confirmed by specialists in the fields of human resources management, institutional behavior, knowledge management, crisis management and passive defense. In addition, path analysis and structural equations were used to confirm the relationship between the variables and the results of the model, respectively. The results indicate that the organizational culture is a significant predictor of knowledge sharing in employees. In other words, the organizational culture does affect the knowledge sharing. Meanwhile the results of structural equation modeling show that identifying the affecting parameters of knowledge sharing in critical conditions and improving them can be constructive in encouraging employees to demonstrate knowledge sharing behavior. What’s more, according to the findings, organizational culture and knowledge sharing considerably affect the control and agility in crisis management.