Case Study Topic: 2010 Pakistan Floods 1. Deen, S. (2015). Pakistan 2010 floods. Policy gaps in disaster preparedness and response. International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, 12, 341-349. doi:10.1016/j.ijdrr.2015.03.007 " Case study use: Factual/Descriptive basis This article is both, descriptive and analytical, it derives information from primary and secondary research sources. Primary sources include fieldwork, interviews with key government officials. Secondary research involved a review and analysis of the existing literature on floods, poverty traps, and disaster relief, response and public rehabilitation. Moreover, government documents and donor organization's annual reports and updates were utilized, as well as newspaper articles to get descriptive accounts of individuals who were affected by the floods in 2010. The author's stated goal is, "to reveal several institutional gaps and regulatory weaknesses that prevail in disaster preparedness and response." The article is organized so that after the …show more content…
The author's goal is to research to evaluate factors associated with access to health care in the aftermath of the 2010 Pakistan floods. The scope of the paper discusses results from a survey conducted. A randomized survey method was used to survey households of the flood-affected population. The households were surveyed approximately six months after the flood's onset and multivariate analysis was used to determine significance. The article is organized in traditional research article format with an introduction, followed a clearly stated hypothesis, and a methods, results and conclusion section. The article is written from a disaster medicine perspective and so it is aimed at researchers, medical professionals, and policymakers. The article was published less than two years ago, almost 6 years after the flooding events, and so it is reasonably recent in its
The targets for this goal are going to be very difficult to measure as climate change is constantly evolving and data will therefore never be specific. “Measuring resilience and adaptive capacity to climate hazards and natural disasters in all countries” is going to be more complex than just collecting the occurrences of these climatic events. Similarly, every government is capable of observing and collecting data on their progress when considering the implementation of measures in target 13.2 and of education programs and the organization of awareness campaigns in target 13.3. However, the difficulty of measuring these targets is that their assessment is based on subjectivity, except for their financial aspect.
In order to become a developed civilization, a country needs a stable resource supply. The Nile River provided all of the necessary resources for Egypt. You need a stable water supply to keep your population stable. Farmland helps you with trade with other countries for other goods and or money. Transportation will allow you to make those trades as well as to travel to other countries to see how to improve your country.
Once the natural disaster occurs, immediate response needs to follow. This period is often chaotic due to the publics, fears, sustained injuries, and apparent damages are seen. During this stage, the community nurse can provide medical attention to the injured victims as well as emotional support. Public
The SARS led to the loss of lives, business bankruptcy and affected the tourism industry, this all led to a negative impact on the economy of the country. The health systems should use the three reports, Naylor, Kirby and Walker to renew the systems by increasing the resources, improving the systems and inter-agency cooperation. These would help by allowing for a better plan and preparing for future disasters. Political parties should come together with a common objective of having a plan for infectious disease protection, there should be a political motive to implement the plan and the need for the political parties to review and maintain the plan to ensure protection of the entire community. There is a need to increase the number of medical practitioners, and should be trained to deal with these types of incident should they happen in the future.
Introduction The novel Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital by Sheri Fink is a gripping recollection of experiences from the effects of the natural disaster, Hurricane Katrina. Ethical dilemmas were presented when dying patients and poor conditions met. Because of Katrina, the floodwaters caused power outages that eliminated the ability to use essential equipment to care for critically ill patients (p. 64). Patients on life support required nurses to manually ambu-bagging them in order to maintain ventilation (p. 125).
Housing conditions are comprised of the actual physical infrastructure of the house (whether it is sub-par construction or manufactured housing), homeownership and location/overcrowding. The housing conditions directly reflect what Tierney describes as the “affluence” of the populations, which is the ability to have affordable, well-constructed, self-owned homes. Many people at the lower end of the social class strata are living in poorly made/maintain housing, which they rent, in areas that are prone to disaster. Many of these individuals are unable to afford better housing, transportation, or have the ability to evacuate or prepare for a disaster. Similarly, after a disaster, these populations have a much lower resilience due to their social factors.
More and more authorities continue to be taken away and have been spread across many agencies within DHS. “FEMA no longer manages a comprehensive emergency management program of mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery and the agency function that President Carter and the Governors envisioned in 1979 no longer exists” (FEMA, 2013). The sole focus has turned to terrorism disaster preparedness and FEMA has become somewhat dismantled and lost its ability to provide the command and control that it had prior to the move to DHS. This will prove to be a major flaw and will again, show the failure of FEMA in the next occurrence of natural disaster the United States faces. There are other agencies within the DHS that need to be scrutinized as
Emergency management describes the process of preparing for disasters, responding to their occurrence and putting in place both structural and nonstructural measures to mitigate against them. Emergency management has come a long way in terms of evolution in the United States of America. In terms of evolution, there have been a number of changes with evidence in shift from state to federal and local involvement in disaster management. This paper will thus discuss the evolution of emergency management as well as the lessons that have come as a result of this evolution. The evolution can be traced back to the biblical times, Moses himself tried to manage floods by splitting the Red Sea (George et al, p. 1).
The Stafford Act was enacted in 1988 and determines how and when the federal government is allowed to intervene in a natural disaster. It also defines the type of assistance to be provided as well as the distribution of funds among the federal, state and local governments. FEMA is responsible for coordinating the assistance identified in the Stafford Act. However, FEMA has to answer to the Secretary of Homeland Security rather than making their own decisions. The authors describe how our current governmental system isn’t well equipped to deal with major devastation such as Hurricane Katrina.
However, this should be a learning experience that hospitals have to be more prepared for situations like this to happen. A number of factors like how the Memorial Medical Center was built was a huge problem, the power sources were vulnerable to the hurricane and were damaged. The wall 's structure of the hospitals was too weak and were able to get destroyed before help arrived. The faculty of the hospital were also in need of preparation on how to deal with the situation. We have to keep this in mind and remember that health care professionals will always have the best interest for us for our health and
The novel Five Days at Memorial by Sheri Fink gives an inside view of what happened at Memorial Hospital during Hurricane Katrina (2005); a disaster inside of a disaster. The lack of preparedness or ethical decision making is quite disappointing, considering Memorial hospital is located in New Orleans, Louisiana. New Orleans is well below sea level, and experiences frequent hurricanes and flooding. Memorial hospital itself had little to no plan for evacuating patients once the storm hit. Without power, many of the patients, especially those who were ventilator dependent, became at risk of death.
FEMA’s mission and priorities were changed so that, “terrorism prevention, preparedness, response, and recovery became central to the emergency management mission” (Haddow 325). As a result of the terrorist attacks on 9/11 the country’s focus shifted completely from natural disasters to an outright major assault on all things terrorism with no second glance at the potential emergency’s natural disasters presented. There might be a possibility that because of the nation’s extreme obsession with terrorists and terrorism that Hurricane Katrina was not given full priority nor given as much thought as it should have been because the whole focus of the government was on terrorism. When an agency and governmental structure, such as the defense agencies, undergoes an extreme shift within the course of a few years brought on so suddenly, there are bound to be weaknesses. Hurricane Katrina was the most challenging threat that tested the DHS as well as FEMA’s preparation and mitigation of natural disasters since the shift of focus.
Though the community only has a small effect on the overall picture, they are the most vulnerable to all disasters and threats. Therefore, it is the responsibility of the community to prepare one another and assess the potential risks and hazards within their community in addition to what steps are needed to address the issues. It is this preemptive response and planning, especially in locations with historically reoccurring hazards that reduce the disaster effects and overall cost. This community-based effort conducted by community groups has the, “potential to make a significant and long-lasting contributions to reducing local vulnerability and strengthening adaptive capacities” (Allen, 2006, p. 97). One example of a community-organized group is Community Emergency Response Teams or CERT.
The most recent flood occur in Kuching, Sarawak where heavy rainfall caused some areas around Kuching to be inundated by flood waters and most roads became congested as they were impassable to traffic. The heavy downpour was still continuing around Kuching and several stalled vehicles were left on the flooded roads. Several key places were flooded including the Sarawak General Hospital, Sarawak Contingent Police Headquarters at Jalan Badaruddin, Padungan fire and rescue station, Faculty of Medicine at Universiti Malaysia Sarawak, Universiti Teknologi Mara Samarahan campus, and areas around Padang Merdeka. Meanwhile, a landslide was reported to occur at mile 18 Jalan Serian Tebedu which made the road impassable. Several villagers who lived around the river banks especially in
2.8 Main Cause of Flood According to Jabatan Penerangan Malaysia (2012), issues of flood that happen certainly had their own causes. There are many causes such as: 2.8.1 Continuous Rain Continuous rain without stopping can cause flooding. In low areas, rain water will flow into the river. River filled with water will overflow causing lowland area are flooded.