Browsing by Author "Kendra, James"
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Item The Challenges for Unconventional Response Agencies in Serving Haitian Earthquake Survivors: The Needs in ICS Training and Practices(Disaster Research Center, 2011) Kelly, Joshua; Arlikatti, Sudha; Kendra, James; Nigg, Joanne; Torres, ManuelThe Haiti earthquake of January 12th, 2010 provided a unique opportunity to further our knowledge concerning “mass invacuation” planning processes. No systematic research assessment has been undertaken to look at how host communities manage the process of receiving evacuees, providing immediate mass care, and resettling displaced individuals. This research focuses on the initial phase of the evacuation/invacuation process of the 2010 Haiti Earthquake, from the day after the earthquake (January 13, 2010) through April 2011. The data has been collected as part of an NSF-RAPID grant, a collaborative proposal between the University of Delaware and the University of North Texas, organizations are the units of analysis, and we have used qualitative interview techniques as our data collection method. Reviewing our data has highlighted the challenges faced by public sector emergency managers as they interacted with and attempted to integrate unconventional emergency response organizations into the Incident Command System. Lindell and Perry (2007) state that in order for planning and preparedness for emergencies to be effective, stakeholders at every level need to be included. Further findings may suggest how alternative emergency response organizations can plan and train for mass evacuation events or how conventional emergency responders can integrate them within the ICS modular structure. Thus, organizations that seldom play a role in disaster events may be better integrated into disaster response functions when necessary. Overall, disasters are likely to occur more often in the future, leading to more mass evacuations and increasingly complex responsibilities for organizations that, in the past, may not have played a role (Quarentelli 1990). In order to meet the needs of future invacuees/evacuees, public, private, and nonprofit stakeholders need to find new solutions towards collaboration and training while simultaneously meeting current NIMS and ICS requirements.Item Differences in Household Preparedness and Adaptation for COVID-19(Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness, 2022-12-07) Clay, Lauren A.; Kendra, JamesObjective: To quantify differences in preparedness for and adaptations to COVID-19 in a cohort sample of New York City residents. Methods: A proportional quota sample (n = 1020) of individuals residing in New York City during the COVID-19 pandemic participated in a Qualtrics web survey. Quotas were set for age, sex, race, and income to mirror the population of New York City based on the 2018 American Community Survey. Results: Low self-efficacy, low social support, and low sense of community increased the odds of securing provisions to prepare for COVID-19. Being an essential worker, poor mental health, and having children in the household reduced the likelihood of engaging in preparedness practices. Essential workers and individuals with probable serious mental illness were less likely to report preparedness planning for the pandemic. Conclusions: The findings contribute to evolving theories of preparedness. There are differences across the sample in preparedness types, and different kinds of preparedness are associated with different household characteristics. Findings suggest that public officials and others concerned with population wellbeing might productively turn attention to education and outreach activities indexed to these characteristics.Item Emergencies, Crises and Disasters in Hospitals(Disaster Research Center, 2002) Aguirre, B. E.; Kendra, James; Connell, RoryThis paper uses information from 76 participants in 13 focus groups in acute-care hospital organizations in California, Tennessee, and New York, to offer a model of rapid social change in hospitals. It find that hospitals, to ensure health service delivery in a variety of often rapidly changing and turbulent environments, engage in constant improvement and planning, programming, and collective mindfulness of current and future troubles. Hospitals do not differentiate operationally between emergencies, crises and disasters and do not have an objective set of criteria to invoke their disaster plan, but instead rely on staff's subjective evaluations of the actual and/or potential impact of hazards and/or other occasions on their operations; the likely effects of these occasions and conditions on the hospital's ability to continue to care for its patients optimally; the extent to which staff has confidence in its predictions; and the degree of preparedness and planning for these occasions. Community disasters are not necessarily hospital disasters, and the reverse is also the case. The implications of these findings for an institutional conceptualization of disasters are discussed.Item Improvisation, Creativity, and the Art of Emergency Management(Disaster Research Center, 2006) Kendra, James; Wachtendorf, TriciaImprovisation is a significant feature of every disaster, and Tierney (2002) has argued that, if an event doesn’t require improvisation, it is probably not a disaster. Improvisation has had something of a checkered history in the emergency management field since its appearance in a disaster response seems to suggest a failure to plan for a particular contingency. Even scholars who have recognized the value of this capacity have tended to subordinate it to planning. Thus improvisation occupies a somewhat conflicted space in the realm of emergency and crisis management capacities: we plan in detail so that we don’t have to improvise, knowing that we will have to improvise. This paper discusses emerging understandings of improvisation in emergency management and their relationship to planning as well as to other such noted disaster phenomena as emergence, or the appearance of new groups of people organized to meet disaster-related needs. We reconsider the suggestion that improvisation must be positioned with respect to planning in such a way that it somehow seems to be the weak link, or an indication of some failure or dysfunction. We argue that improvisation is a distinct capacity that individuals and groups employ, and that while planning encompasses the normative “what ought to be done,” improvisation encompasses the emergent and actual “what needs to be done.”Item Managing disaster risk associated with critical infrastructure systems: a system-level conceptual framework for research and policy guidance(Civil Engineering and Environmental Systems, 2022-04-25) Davidson, Rachel A.; Kendra, James; Ewing, Bradley; Nozick, Linda K.; Starbird, Kate; Cox, Zachary; Leon-Corwin, MaggieThis paper presents a new conceptual framework of the disaster risk of critical infrastructure systems in terms of societal impacts. Much research on infrastructure reliability focuses on specific issues related to the technical system or human coping. Focusing on the end goal of infrastructure services – societal functioning – this framework offers a new way to understand how those more focused research areas connect and the current thinking in each. Following an overview of the framework, each component is discussed in turn, including the initial buildout of physical systems; event occurrence; service interruptions; service provider response; user adaptations to preserve or create needed services; and the ending deficit in societal function. Possible uses of the framework include catalysing and guiding a systematic research agenda that could ultimately lead to a computational framework and stimulating discussion on resilience within utility and emergency management organisations and the larger community.Item San Bruno California, September 9, 2010 Gas Pipeline Explosion and Fire(Disaster Research Center, 2012) Davidson, Rachel A.; Kendra, James; Li, Sizheng; Long, Laurie C.; McEntire, David A.; Scawthorn, Charles; Kelly, JoshuaOn September 9, 2010 a buried high pressure 30-inch steel natural gas pipeline exploded in a residential neighborhood in the City of San Bruno, California, a suburb of San Francisco. The explosion and ensuing fire killed 8 and injured 58, and destroyed 38 and damaged 70 homes. During the first 50 hours following the incident, over 500 firefighters and 90 apparatus responded, involving 42 fire agencies. The total cost of the disaster is estimated to be approximately $1.6 billion. Local and regional jurisdictions have been engaged in extensive and sophisticated recovery and reconstruction operations, which continue as of this writing. This report, funded by the National Science Foundation under a RAPID grant, is based on site visits, interviews, and secondary data collection, and addresses emergency response and recovery from two perspectivesengineering and social science. Causes of the explosion were examined by the National Transportation Safety Board and are not considered in detail. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with public officials of the principal fire and emergency services and with representatives of non-profit organizations active in the area. Team members made several site visits from immediately after the event in September 2010 to February 2011. Key findings and research issues identified include the following. First, there are difficult theoretical and practical questions about the ability of infrastructure organizations to maintain their attention on their own operations over long periods, resulting in degrading safety and reliability. Second, there are similarities between this isolated event and what may occur in a major earthquake in the San Francisco Bay Area. This event was well responded to; in a major earthquake, similar resources are likely to be unavailable, potentially leading to significant secondary (i.e., fire following earthquake) losses. Third, three current engineering risk methods for estimation of safety zones around gas transmission lines were examined and generally validated vis-à-vis data from the incident. Fourth, detailed timelines and actions by emergency responders and recovery officials are recorded, providing a basis for future research on issues of expedient or spontaneous planning in emergencies. Fifth, a georeferenced database of almost 300 photographs of damage resulting from the incident is appended to the report, for use by researchers in examining fire spread and other issues.Item The Waterborne Evacuation of Lower Manhattan on September 11: A Case of Distributed Sensemaking(Disaster Research Center, 2006) Kendra, James; Wachtendorf, TriciaSensemaking is the study of how individuals and organizations understand what is happening around them. The sensemaking paradigm provides a frame for understanding the gathering and comprehension of information throughout an organization and the capacities for action that are coupled, cause and effect, to that comprehension. Typically, researchers look at sensemaking in a single organization. Recently, interest has developed in distributed sensemaking, with multiple participants discovering meaning and capacities for action in their environment and in their emerging relationships. This paper examines a case of distributed sensemaking, the waterborne evacuation of Lower Manhattan on September 11, 2001 in which several hundred thousand commuters left the island in an improvised fleet of assorted harbor craft. Virtually no prior planning existed for this event; hence, the participants collectively derived norms and meaning from their circumstances. The paper relates accepted features of sensemaking to this event, showing how these features varied from their usually-understood forms in order to yield sensemaking that was distributed across geographic and organizational space.Item Workshop on Deploying Post-disaster Quick-response Reconnaissance Teams: Methods, Strategies, and Needs(Disaster Research Center, 2015) Kendra, James; Gregory, Sarah;The National Science Foundation funded the University of Delaware’s Disaster Research Center to convene a workshop in June, 2012 on quick-response disaster research, with the purpose of probing the state-of-the-art and to provide recommendations to NSF on the administration of the RAPID grant program--a principal source of funding for quick response reconnaissance deployments. This workshop brought together experts in this particular research genre to share methods and best practices in order to improve the science and art craft of quick response research, and to bolster methods for conducting quick-response post-disaster reconnaissance studies.