I'm at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, attending the Disaster Management 2011 Conference organised jointly by UCF and Wessex Institute of Technology (UK).
We were welcomed to the event by Carlos Brebbia (WIT) and Alain Kassab (UCF) who each told us a lot about their respective organisations. We then had a very interesting keynote talk by Naim Kapucu, from the Centre for Public and Non-Profit Management. He described how his PhD research was on the emergency responses to the terrorist attacks on the USA in September 11th 2001. On completing this he thought he would move into more general policy issues but fate had different ideas. He relocated to Florida and in 2004 the central region was struck by four hurricanes in rapid succession. This inevitably drew him back into the field of emergency responses to large scale disasters.
[Florida is so accustomed to extreme weather events that every lecture theatre on campus has its own copy of the disaster response plan. The reality of this was brought home to me as I noticed the janitor's office next to the ladies loo was marked as a hurricane emergency local resource centre].
Dr Kapucu's research has made use of social network analysis to explore the interrelationships between the various federal, state, local, public and private sector organisations that all have a role to play in disaster management. he showed us some fascinating visual representations of the these networks, which can be used to diagnose weaknesses or breakdowns that may place the public at risk.
Towards the end of the day it was my turn to present the paper I co-authored with folks at Coventry: The contribution of human psychology to disaster management: mitigation, advance preparedness, response and recovery. Given this rather inclusive title, luckily in my presentation I only had to plot out a broad overview of the areas where work has been done, and highlight gaps where there is potential for further development. The talk went well (I think) and I had some interesting questions, including one from a US healthcare professional about the phenomenon of 'worried well' self-presenting to emergency departments in crises, and another on the ways in which online social networking may give us an insight into the behaviour of volunteers in a disaster. More great ideas for further research...
The paper is available (in full text, via open access) at http://library.witpress.com/pages/PaperInfo.asp?PaperID=22040
During the final session of the day we became aware of a thunderstorm and high winds which necessitated a swift retreat back to the conference hotel. I'm very grateful to the team who looked after us, reassured us and got us indoors safely before the threatened 'dime-sized' hailstones arrived.
