Frances Edwards

California Seismic Safety Commission: Multi-disciplinary Collaboration for Seismic Safety Mitigation

Mitigation creates the basis for community resiliency by lessening the disaster’s toll on the physical environment. For example, the contrasting outcomes of earthquakes in Chile and Haiti demonstrate the value of physical mitigation through building codes and engineering. Policy interventions and governmental mechanisms can enhance the likelihood of mitigation steps being taken in advance of disaster, which in turn improves the resiliency of communities. California’s seismic activity in populated areas has led to the creation of mitigation measures for schools, hospitals, residential and commercial buildings, and infrastructure, which grew from multi-disciplinary collaboration. This collaborative approach is embodied in the California Seismic Safety Commission, which oversees the state’s hazard mitigation plan. The commissioners include representatives from science, engineering, emergency management, and social services who can apply their expertise to the evaluation of potential mitigation measures, work with the legislature for passage and funding of mitigation measures, and work with local governments for the implementation of policies and programs to create resiliency. This chapter evaluates the contributions of multi-disciplinary collaboration to the development of resiliency in California as a model for other states and nations confronted with intractable natural hazards.

Exploring the Effectiveness of Transit Security Awareness Campaigns in the San Francisco Bay Area, California

Public involvement in alerting officials of suspicious and potentially harmful activity is critical to the overall security of a transit system. As part of an effort to get passengers and the public involved, many transit agencies have security awareness campaigns. The objective of this research is to learn how transit agencies seek to make security awareness campaigns effective and to explore how they measure the effectiveness of such campaigns, if at all. This research project includes data from case studies of five major agencies that provide transit service in the San Francisco Bay Area region of California. The case study data consist of descriptions of the types of security awareness campaigns the agencies have implemented, the goals of the campaigns, and how they seek to make their campaigns effective, as well as whether and how these agencies measure and determine the effectiveness of their campaigns. One positive finding of this research is the consistency with which Bay Area transit organizations address the need for passenger awareness as part of their overall security program. However, none of the five agencies analyzed for this study measures the effectiveness of their campaigns. Although they all have a similar goal—to increase passenger awareness about security issues—little evidence exists confirming to what extent they are achieving this goal. Suggestions are offered for using outcome measurements to provide a reasonable indication of a campaigns effectiveness by capturing the publics response to a campaign.

Current Capabilities of First Responders in Different Countries

The organizational structure for the response to a catastrophic terror attack in Austria is shown in Fig. 15. The overall responsibility for civil protection and security rests with the Austrian Ministry of Interior (MoI). However, the MoI can exercise its authority only trough law enforcement operatives, i.e. for all other topic areas the MoI has to rely on the support of other organizations and institutions.