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Item Haiti’s Emergency Management: A Case of Regional Support, Challenges, Opportunities, and Recommendations for the Future(FEMA, U.S. Department of Homeland Security: http://training.fema.gov/EMIWeb/edu/CompEmMgmtBookProject.asp, 2012) Fordyce, Erin; Sadiq, Abdul-Akeem; Chikoto, Grace L.As one of the poorest nations in the Western Hemisphere (with over 70 percent of the population living on less than $2 a day) (Grunewald et al. 2010), one wonders about the state of the Haitian Emergency Management System prior to the 2010 earthquake. Clearly, Haiti has been an economically-challenged nation for decades and its protracted poverty level further increases its vulnerability to disasters (PAHO 1994) and impacts its ability to respond and recover effectively when disasters occur. In addition, political instabilities have led to poor economic development opportunities and increased risks. In spite of Haiti’s economic and political challenges, it is possible to gain insight into what the country’s emergency management system looked like before the 2010 earthquake. Haiti had a fledgling national emergency management system in place - one that was heavily supported by both regional and international bodies. The earthquake of January 12, 2010, however, underscores the need for a better disaster reduction and response program, one that would address the underlying and protracted vulnerabilities of Haiti, while ushering in new winds of change that would pump fresh blood into the veins of the emergency management system. This chapter reviews the history of Haiti, including its demography and geography, and examines the hazards and factors contributing to the nation’s vulnerability to disasters. Furthermore, this chapter discusses some past disasters, Haiti’s emergency management system as well as the opportunities and the challenges confronting the system. We conclude by offering some recommendations for improving Haiti’s abilities to deal with disasters.Item Organizational Risk Perception of Disasters: Do Risk Managers Matter?(Harvard Center for Risk Analysis, 2014-03-20) Sadiq, Abdul-Akeem; Graham, John D.Previous research on risk perception suggests that individual neglect of disasters is likely due to an inability to process information about low-probability, high-consequence threats and moral hazard. As a result, it is important to study the quality of organizational responses to disasters, since they may be crucial to compensating for the frailty of individual choice. Preliminary evidence suggests that an organizational risk manager is important in disaster planning, but there is no empirical evidence (to our knowledge) that having a designated risk manager leads to the adoption of risk-reducing measures in organizations. Additionally, there is limited research on the relationship between risk perception and the adoption of risk-reducing measures at the organizational level. The goal of this study is to empirically answer two questions. (1) “Does having a risk manager in an organization predict the adoption of risk-reducing measures?” (2) “What is the relationship between risk perception and the adoption of risk-reducing measures at the organizational level?” Using data collected from a sample of public, private, and non-profit organizations in the Memphis/Shelby County area, Tennessee in 2006, we find that organizations with risk managers adopted more risk-reducing measures than organizations without risk managers and that risk perception is a significant predictor of risk-reducing measures. This study builds on a small, but growing literature on how organizations perceive risks and respond to them.Item Time-to-event modeling of subreddits transitions to r/SuicideWatch(IEEE, 2022) Liu, Xueying; Fang, Shiaofen; Mohler, George; Carlson, Joan; Xiao, Yunyu; Computer and Information Science, School of ScienceRecent data mining research has focused on the analysis of social media text, content and networks to identify suicide ideation online. However, there has been limited research on the temporal dynamics of users and suicide ideation. In this work, we use time-to-event modeling to identify which subreddits have a higher association with users transitioning to posting on r/suicidewatch. For this purpose we use a Cox proportional hazards model that takes as input text and subreddit network features and outputs a probability distribution for the time until a Reddit user posts on r/suicidewatch. In our analysis we find a number of statistically significant features that predict earlier transitions to r/suicidewatch. While some patterns match existing intuition, for example r/depression is positively associated with posting sooner on r/suicidewatch, others were more surprising (for example, the average time between a high risk post on r/Wishlist and a post on r/suicidewatch is 10.2 days). We then discuss these results as well as directions for future research.Item Zimbabwe’s Emergency Management System: A Promising Development(FEMA, U.S. Department of Homeland Security. http://training.fema.gov/EMIWeb/edu/CompEmMgmtBookProject.asp, 2012) Chikoto, Grace L.; Sadiq, Abdul-AkeemZimbabwe’s encounter with droughts, in particular, combined with economic and political challenges, has denigrated the country’s former status as the “breadbasket of Southern Africa” (Hunter-Gault 2006; Maphosa 1994; Swarns 2002). Zimbabwe is particularly prone to a number of natural and man-made hazards such as droughts, floods, veld fires, storms (PreventionWeb 2012), and HIV/AIDS (United Nations Development Programme 2010) among other epidemics. Between 1980 and 2010, PreventionWeb (2012) documented 35 natural disaster events, which resulted in 6,448 deaths, averaging 208 deaths from disasters annually. Of the 35 natural disasters, 6 were drought occurrences, 7 were floods, 2 were storms, and 20 were epidemic occurrences. Chikoto (2004) 1 also counted the number of public transportation disasters that plagued Zimbabwe between 1982 and 2003, which claimed over 700 lives and injured over 400 people. To mitigate and prepare for these and other hazards facing Zimbabwe, the Government of Zimbabwe (GoZ) created the Department of Civil Protection and charged it with the onus of coordinating and managing disasters and reducing hazards. This chapter traces the history of Zimbabwe’s emergency management system, with a focus on the factors contributing to the nation’s vulnerability to disasters and hazards. In addition to tracing the impact of past disasters, the chapter also discusses some of the opportunities and challenges confronting the country’s emergency management system. The chapter concludes with recommendations for improving this system.