Volume 12, Issue 3 - Special Issue: Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and Crisis, Disaster, and Catastrophe Management / Guest edited by Christopher G. Reddick and Akemi Takeoka Chatfield

This article assesses how information and communication technologies (ICTs) hindered the effectiveness of public sector organizational networks in the City of New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. The analysis examines three disaster response networks responsible for disaster planning and preparedness whose primary tasks focused on evacuation, shelter, first response, and public protection. The temporal period under discussion is the immediate days prior to and after Hurricane Katrina made landfall in New Orleans, Friday, August 26, 2005 to Sunday, September 4, 2005. We discuss the status of policies instituted by the federal government, the status of local disaster planning in New Orleans, the theoretical underpinnings and empirical research on communication, ICTs, and the role of organizational networks in public administration, and summarize findings from the small corpus of research on organizational network effectiveness during and after Hurricane Katrina. Our study relies on grounded theory to document how failures of technology, communication, information sharing, and management contributed to reducing organizational network effectiveness and discusses some of the reasons for network failure during the response to Hurricane Katrina. We focus on the need for critical resources and structural conditions that prevented local organizational networks from operating effectively and efficiently. We conclude with an analysis of the continuing relevance of Hurricane Katrina by comparing events that took place following Hurricane Sandy and with series of recommendations for assessing the probability of future disasters including use of a different theoretical framework, social-ecological system thinking; a commitment to and investment in metrics, indicators, and data to measure progress towards resilience; significant investments to harden and redesign key infrastructure; and the adoption of an international perspective to inform national policies and practices.

We know that information quality affects the performance of relief agencies during emergency management processes. Yet, recent studies keep revealing that relief workers faced information quality challenges during emergencies. While this can be partly attributed to the fragmented nature of the incompatible information systems that were designed from a single-agency perspective in order to support routine processes, there is a desperate need for overarching architecture principles that allow for the support of non-routine, interagency information needs. Principles are defined as normative, reusable and directive statements that guide architects in designing the capabilities needed to achieve overarching goals. This study presents a methodology for extracting such principles for information systems that can be employed for emergency management processes. Based on literature review, case surveys, interviews with architects and qualitative analysis, 12 principles are proposed for information quality assurance. Architects working at relief agencies can adopt these principles to redesign information systems in order to assure information quality from an interagency perspective. Due to the absence of an interagency system governing body, the main challenge lies in promoting and monitoring the adoption of such principles across relief agencies.

Understanding evacuation practices and outcomes helps crisis and disaster personnel plan, manage, and rebuild during disasters. Yet the recent expansion in the number of information and communication technologies (ICTs) available to individuals and organizations has changed the speed and reach of evacuation-related messages. This study explores ICTs’ influences on evacuation decision-making and traffic congestion. Drawing from both social science and transportation science, we develop a model representative of individual decision making outcomes based on the amount of ICT use, evacuation sources, and the degree of evacuation urgency. We compare the evacuation responses when individuals receive both advance notice of evacuation (ANE) and urgent evacuation (UE) messages under conditions of no ICTs and prolific ICT use. Our findings from the scenarios when there is widespread ICT use reveal a shift in the evacuation time-scale, resulting in traffic congestion early in the evacuation cycle. The effects of this congestion in urgent situations are significantly worse than traffic congestion in the advance notice condition. Even under conditions where face-to-face communication is the only option, evacuations still occur, but at a slower rate, and there are virtually no traffic congestion issues. Our discussion elaborates on the theoretical contributions and focuses on how ICTs have changed evacuation behavior. Future research is needed to explore how to compensate for the rush to the road .

Over the past decades, an increasing number of environmental situations posed threats to humans and assets. Natural disasters happen more frequently and with higher intensity – such as floods caused by heavy rains. One example was the flood that hit in the middle of Europe in 2013. This article reports a single case study of the flood in the German city of Passau in 2013. In the case study we analyze the governance structure employed throughout the flooding as well as how it was managed. Beyond this, we examine how information and communication technology supported the management staff in fulfilling their tasks. Data were collected through semi-structured qualitative interviews with members of the management staff from the main organizations involved in the relief work for the Passau Flood in 2013. Our results show that a hybrid governance structure was employed. All in all, the disaster could be averted, but we identified several challenges and areas for improvement, which could be helpful for managing future disasters successfully.

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) continue to gain important recognition from disaster practitioners and academic researchers during what is arguably the most publicly visible disaster management phase – disaster response. The broader world of GIS academic research and industry practice for disaster response continues to change. This review article inventories the current state-of-the-art in GIS for disaster response and demonstrates progress in the data and people aspects of GIS for disaster response since previous literature reviews. The review is structured to serve as a metaphorical bridge between two reader groups – disaster management practitioners interested in understanding developing trends in GIS for disaster response and academic researchers with minimal to no understanding of GIS and/or mapping concepts within the disaster response context. With this readership in mind, we outline definitions of GIS, disaster response and the need for GIS in disaster response, review interdisciplinary literature from a variety of spatially-oriented disaster management fields and demonstrate progress in various aspects of GIS for disaster response. The review concludes with a GIS for disaster response research agenda and provides a list of resources for researchers new to GIS and spatial perspectives for disaster management research.

Technology is being applied to governmental functions with the intent to improve governmental operations. Most research on technology acceptance has focused on the private sector with less being applied to the public sector, and little applied to the domain of disaster management. As we continue to expand upon technological applications in governmental affairs, it is important to understand how the increasing role of information and communications technology (ICT) affects disaster management. Utilizing a conceptual model adapting Venkatesh et al’s (2003) unified theory of acceptance and use of technology model to an emergency management context, factors of performance expectancy, effort expectancy, and social influence along with emergency management specific factors such as threat perception, disaster history, social vulnerability, disaster exercises and emergency management collaboration are used to examine the intent to use EMDSS. Multiple regression analysis using data obtained from a survey of local emergency managers in FEMA Region VI taken in the fall of 2012 indicate that social influence, effort expectancy, community social vulnerability and collaboration among emergency management agencies influences the intent to use EMDSS technology. This study contributes to our understanding of technology adoption among local governments by showing that the factors that influence emergency management officials’ intent to use EMDSS differ from factors found in private sector applications. Most notably, in EMDSS applications, social influence and ease of use are the strongest predictors of intent to use rather than performance expectations.

Social media has been widely adopted for assisting the efforts in emergency response and recovery, but it has been underutilized for emergency planning purposes. Emergency planning in a local community context must leverage accessible and free resources such as social media, because it is largely a volunteer enterprise. We describe our fieldwork with local annual festival emergency planning teams that led to the design of the Community Incident Report (CIR). CIR is a novel emergency planning system that externalizes community knowledge on persisting issues and common mitigation strategies by integrating police reports, local crisis information, and social multimedia content to foster citizens’ awareness of local emergency information and to assist emergency planners in planning for recurring and cyclical events. We provide a use case analysis of CIR and its evaluation with 20 local residents, and discuss how it could be extended to inform emergency planning for other community events and local municipalities that share similar characteristics.

Social media have transformed traditional configurations of how risk signals related to an infectious disease outbreak (IDO) are transmitted from public health authorities to the general public. However, our understanding of how social media might influence risk perceptions during these situations, and the influence of such processes on ensuing societal responses remains limited. This paper draws on key ideas from the Social Amplification of Risk Framework (SARF), Socially Mediated Crisis Communication (SMCC) model and a case study of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) social media management of the 2009 H1N1 pandemic to propose a new conceptual model. The Risk Amplification through Media Spread (RAMS) model brings clarity to the new complexities in media management of IDOs by delineating the processes of message diffusion and risk amplification through communication channels that are often highly integrated due to social media. The model offers recommendations for communication priorities during different stages of an IDO. The paper concludes with a discussion of the RAMS model from theoretical and applied perspectives, and sets the direction for future conceptual refinement and empirical testing.

In this paper, we examine the socio-technical impact that social media has had on coordination between professional emergency responders and digital volunteers. Drawing from the research literature, we outline the problem space and explore ways to improve coordination and collaboration between these two groups. Possible improvements include mediators, revisiting trust, emergency policy and process changes, a bounded social environment, digital volunteer data as context, and computational solutions. As the space matures and collaboration improves, we predict that professional responders will begin to rely on the data and products produced by digital volunteers. Volunteer groups will be challenged to mature as well, to develop volunteer management systems, permanent staff, data management practices, and training for new volunteers to ensure consistent response to professional responders as needed.

A key task in emergency management is the timely dissemination of information to decision makers across different scales of operations, particularly to individual citizens. Incidents over the past decade highlight communication gaps between government and constituents that have led to suboptimal outcomes. Social media can provide valuable tools to reduce those gaps. This article contributes to the existing literature on social media use by empirically demonstrating how and to what extent state-level emergency management agencies employ social media to increase public participation and promote behavioral changes intended to reduce household and community risk. Research to this point has empirically examined only response and recovery phases related to this process. This article addresses each phase of emergency management through the analysis of Twitter messages posted over a 3-month period. Our research demonstrates that while most messages conformed to traditional one-to-many government communication tactics, a number of agencies employed interactive approaches including one-to-one and many-to-many strategies.

Communication during and after disasters increasingly relies on social media technologies. For example, victims, emergency responders, and others took to Twitter to share information about conditions, aid, resources and the like in the aftermath of the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake. The current paper concerns how a re-tweet count, or the number of others who have already forwarded a message, influences people’s spreading of disaster-related tweets. The results of a human-subjects experiment revealed that, when the re-tweet count of a tweet increased, the likelihood that people would share the tweet increased when it came from an individual’s account, but the likelihood decreased when it came from a news agency’s account. These social influences disappeared when the re-tweet counts were over 1000 people. These findings extend the understanding of how disaster-related information spreads on social media, which is essential for improving social media during disaster management.

Large-scale disasters can produce profound disruptions in the fabric of interdependent critical infrastructure systems such as water, telecommunications and electric power. The work of post-disaster infrastructure restoration typically requires information sharing and close collaboration across these sectors; yet – due to a number of factors – the means to investigate decision making phenomena associated with these activities are limited. This paper motivates and describes the design and implementation of a computer-based synthetic environment for investigating collaborative information seeking in the performance of a (simulated) infrastructure restoration task. The main contributions of this work are twofold. First, it develops a set of theoretically grounded measures of collaborative information seeking processes and embeds them within a computer-based system. Second, it suggests how these data may be organized and modeled to yield insights into information seeking processes in the performance of a complex, collaborative task. The paper concludes with a discussion of implications of this work for practice and for future research.