WorkShop for Crisis Response
Co-Sponsored by Cal-(IT)² and UCI
Date & Time: Tuesday, March 19th, 2002 (7:30
a.m. - 7:00 p.m.)
Location: University of California, Irvine
Coping with crisis situations that arise due
to natural or man-made causes is one of the most critical
and urgent challenges to modern society. Examples of natural
disasters include earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes,
fires, and flash floods. Man-made disasters could result
from terrorist attacks on vital infrastructures (including
computing and communication infrastructures), biological
and chemical attacks, and nuclear emergencies. Both natural
and man-made disasters can have catastrophic impact on
life. For example, the 1995 earthquake in Kobe, Japan
cost multitude of lives and over 100 billion in damage.
Crisis
management refers to the activities encompassing the immediate
response to the disaster event, recovery efforts, mitigation,
and preparedness efforts to reduce impact of future crises.
While it includes a variety of activities (e.g., claims
and relief processing, training and field exercises of
emergency workers, infrastructure reconstruction), the
most important and challenging aspect is immediate crisis
response to protect life and property following the disaster.
Such a response may span a few hours to a few days depending
upon the incident. Crisis response consists of multiple
steps such as (1) damage assessment, (2) response needs
assessment, (3) response prioritization, and (4) plan
implementation which includes coordination and mobilization
of rescue operations, resource and logistic planning (e.g.,
triage, medical care, food, water, shelter), evacuation
planning (of people, machinery, and property), situation
monitoring, and timely information dissemination to citizens,
news media, agencies, and hospitals. Crisis response requires
a coordinated effort from a potentially large team of
diverse city, county, state and federal agencies. Challenges
arise from the magnitude of the problem, the level of
coordination required across heterogeneous organizations,
and the number of people involved in the operation. Effectiveness
of response depends upon its timeliness and urgency. For
example, a several hour delay in initiating some response
actions could result in dire consequences in terms of
human life, property damage and general state of confusion
that would impede critical emergency response operations.
In
each of the different phases of the crisis response cycle
(damage assessment, response needs identification, response
prioritization, and plan implementation), timely access
to the right information by the right person/agency/team
at the required level of detail is key to the success
of the operation. One fundamental cause for high response
latency is the limitations of existing information, computation,
and communication infrastructures in collecting, processing,
interpreting, integrating, prioritizing, and disseminating
large amounts of diverse types of unstructured information
over potentially damaged, unreliable, insecure, and partially
available network and communication infrastructures. Another
impediment is the lack of sophisticated techniques for
logistics and resource planning, and decision making in
the presence of unreliable and imprecise information.
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