Frank Fiedrich

Linking infrastructure resilience to response requirements: the New Madrid Seismic Zone case

Catastrophic events generate cascading and synergistic infrastructure failures that will produce unanticipated response requirements. Infrastructure failures not only influence the demands for services and commodities but also the mobility and capability of response organisations. This project modelled a catastrophic earthquake (M7.7) in the New Madrid Seismic Zone (NMSZ). The US Geological Survey (USGS) has estimated the probability of a major NMSZ (M7.5 to M8.0) earthquake has a 7% to 10% probability of occurring in a 50-year period (US Geological Survey, 2006). The effects of such an event will cause tens of thousands of injuries and thousands of deaths. Over seven million people will experience disruptions in lifelines and two million will seek shelter. Direct impacts will be felt in the Central USA with ripple effects evident throughout the nation. Damage to critical infrastructure and lifelines will severely impair response and recovery efforts. The comprehensive modelling performed in this study provides not only direct damages to physical inventory, but also estimates the social impacts and response requirements. These inputs provide emergency managers the information required to plan and develop strategies to respond to such an event.

Introduction to ‘Urban Disaster Resilience and Security—Addressing Risks in Societies’

Resilience as a term carries an emphasis on temporal development after an event. It also stresses the phase of rebounding after an impact. There is still a lack of disaster resilience operationalization or measurement, which impairs the credibility of the multi-facetted resilience concept, for both science and decision-making. On the other hand, measurability and bouncing back conceptualisations are criticised on multiple grounds; myopia on the range of holistic abilities commonly associated with resilience and neglect of context better to be captured with qualitative approaches. Addressing risks in societies prompts investigating all aspects of resilience conceptualisation and attempts at assessing it—and it is the ambition of this book to highlight examples and at the same time critically reflecting about their reach and limitations. Security and resilience are both terms used for framing a whole field of research and policy. Overlaps are hardly researched, however and the edited chapters will address certain recent aspects that will help to identify features for a common understanding and framework of risk, security and resilience. Urban areas are used here as a common denominator of human values and assets, exposed to different types of external and internal threats to security, which stimulate different types of resilience.

The Fifth International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management, Washington DC, May 4-7 2008

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Competence as Enabler of Urban Critical Infrastructure Resilience Assessment

Providers of urban critical infrastructures are often relying on indicator-based approaches for resilience management. While science is developing more and more intelligent resilience indicators, the application and interpretation of such indicators might lead to new challenges and questions. Since models always reduce the complexity of real world systems, users of the developed indicators need to understand the underlying assumptions. Otherwise, simplifications may lead to misinterpretations and severe consequences for the infrastructure providers and the society. In this chapter the authors discuss the difficulties related to the development and usage of resilience indictors and present relevant quality criteria for their evaluation and selection. Additionally, proper resilience assessment requires expert skills and an advanced knowledge and competence profile. Bloom’s learning taxonomy provides the theoretical underpinning which may be used to develop such profiles.

Kritische Infrastrukturen und Business Continuity Management

Die heutige Gesellschaft ist mehr denn je von Kritischen Infrastrukturen abhangig. Egal, ob es sich dabei um die Stromversorgung, die Telekommunikation, die Nahrungsmittelversorgung oder unsere Mobilitat handelt, eine Storung oder Ausfall fuhrt zu weitreichenden Konsequenzen fur die Industrie, die Gesellschaft und das offentliche Leben. Zahlreiche Ereignisse wie beispielsweise der Stromausfall im Munsterland im Jahr 2005 mit 250.000 betroffenen Personen zeigen dies. Umso wichtiger ist es, dass Betreiber Kritischer Infrastrukturen die Ausfallwahrscheinlichkeit und Konsequenzen moglichst gering halten. Dieses Kapitel zeigt, wie Betreiber die eigenen Prozesse im Unternehmen besser verstehen und hinsichtlich kritischer Elemente besser bewerten konnen. Es wird aufgezeigt, wie mithilfe eines Business Continuity Management Systems ein umfassendes Verstandnis uber die eigenen Geschaftsprozesse erlangt werden kann und diese gegeneinander bezuglich ihrer Kritikalitat priorisiert werden konnen. Wesentlicher Kernpunkt dieser Managementmethode ist die Business Impact Analysis, welche hier im Speziellen erlautert wird. Das strukturierte Verstehen, Bewerten und Absichern von Kernprozessen im Kontext Kritischer Infrastrukturen soll im Rahmen dieses Kapital als Kompetenz vermittelt werden.

Assessing the Impact of Crowd Tasking Apps on Resuscitation Success: The Case of Sudden Cardiac Arrests in Germany

Sudden cardiac arrest SCA is among the three most prominent causes of death in industrialized nations. Therefore, experts are calling for solutions, including IT-systems to mobilize volunteers. SCA emergencies require immediate action and advanced first aid skills. As of today, emergency services are often unable to arrive at the victim in time, and laypeople on the scene frequently fail to conduct resuscitation properly. One approach to solve this problem is to rely on skilled volunteers, who are alerted by smartphone apps. Among others, German researchers are currently developing a crisis response system with a crowd tasking app. It aims to help reduce the effects of large-scale events, but also of ad-hoc incidents including SCA. This paper describes an approach to determine the potential of the system to increase the survival rate of SCA illustrated based upon data from Germany. Its concept was analyzed by experts and benefited from their feedback.