Mechanism System framework of Emergency Management

EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT

An Chen1,2, Jingjing Qi3 and Ning Chen4

1 Institute of Policy and Management, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijng, 100190, China

2 Institute of Emergency Management, Henan University, Kaifeng, China

3 School of Mathematics, Shandong University, Jinan, 250100, China

4 GECAD, Instituto Superior de Engenharia do Porto, Portugal

Abstract

With the modernization of the society, various kinds of risk which threaten

human life and property become more and more serious. The general

mechanism of emergency and related management is of crucial importance to

guide the process of emergency management for lessening the negative impact of

emergency. This paper proposes the structure of mechanism system, which is

composed of principle, logic, process and operation mechanisms for emergency

and related management respectively. The implication and functionality of the

mechanisms are discussed.

Keywords: incident, emergency, emergency management, mechanism

Introduction

Nowadays, we are living in a seemingly calm, but in reality dangerous society, and some of the risks are brought by the modernization of society. During the past years, various kinds of emergency frequently occurred all over the world and constituted a serious menace to human life and property. For example, the “9 11” incident in 2001 caused a great damage to people in both physical and psychological aspects. “SARS”triggered by bacteria in 2003 was a public health emergency in the world. Wenchuan earthquake occurred on May 12, 2008 resulted in the death of thousands of people. Additionally, there are numerous emergencies in the world which made great tragedy on human being such as tsunami natural disasters in Indian Ocean in 2005.

An emergency is a situation which poses an immediate risk to health, life, property or environment [1]. Emergency management is an attractive topic to control and manage emergency based on the analysis of causation, evolution and consequences [2]. The objective is to make optimal decisions to decrease the harm caused by emergency. Particularly, mechanism is of crucial importance to guide the process of emergency management effectively and lessen the negative impact of emergency.

In the traditional dictionary, mechanism is described as "a machine, mechanical appliance, or the arrangement of connected parts in a machine". In this article, mechanism refers to the intrinsic law or logic of emergency and corresponding emergency management. For sudden public incidents, the analysis of mechanism is essential to discover the source of incidents, expose the formation, development and evolution of incidents. Mechanism analysis is the basis of emergency management. With the help of inherent mechanism of incidents, it is possible to respond rapidlyand effectively after the occurrence of incidents, take reasonable measures and reduce the losses.

Although emergency management has drawn a lot of attraction currently, there are still many problems remained in which the mechanism is an important one. The professional mechanism of specific incident has been studied in the literature, however, to the best of our knowledge few work accounts for the general mechanism of emergency and related management systemically. In this paper, the mechanism system based on the analysis of general characteristics of emergency and related management was introduced. Additionally, the principle, logic, process and operation mechanisms are described as the components of the mechanism system. The rest of the paper is organized as follows. In the next section, the related work about mechanism study in some specific fields is introduced. In section 3, the composition of the mechanism system is described and the functionality of mechanisms is defined. Finally, the paper is concluded in section 4.

Related Work

Many priori studies were focused on the occurrence mechanism of specific incidents. For example, the flowing soil disaster was classified into several types according to the occurrence mechanism and controlling solution [3]. Li & Cai investigated the mechanism analogy of rockburst-induced unusual gas emission in coalmines and groundwater-response to far field earthquake [4]. As claimed in [5], the formation mechanism of aviation calamity is essential to prevent the emergence of accident-inducing elements, control the evolution of incidents, decrease the loss, and eventually improve the continuous development of civil aviation. The mechanism and circulation of severe drought, flood and landing typhoon over China is discussed in [6]. In [7], the best solution to control the landslide relied on the description, analysis, and interpretation of landslide mechanism. Oroda gave an overview of various disasters and proposed some management mechanisms addressing the calamities caused by famines [8]. Sukhinov formularized the hydrodynamics and suspension transport for shadow water basins in mathematical models and showed the main reason of ecological disaster was the stable structure of water currents in the eastern part of the Sea of Azov [9]. Similarly, several modes of velocity profile were proposed to represent the mechanism of shear-zone development in granular materials for disaster risk mitigation of rapid long run-out landslides [10].

In [11], the authors analyzed the influencing factors in public emergency diffusion, diffusion mode, property and diffusion dynamic of incidents based on the ubiquity of diffusion process in the public emergency evolution. Lv & Wang divided the proliferation mode of emergent events into four categories, namely radiation, chain, circulation and transference concerning the characteristic of proliferation route [12].

In [13], the eruptive period was described by five stages: 1) slow summit inflation and sporadic seismicity; 2) rapid summit inflation and a short seismic crisis; 3) rapid flank inflation, onset of summit deflation and sporadic seismicity accompanied by stable effusion; 4) flank inflation, coupled with summit deflation, intense seismicity and increased lava effusion; 5) little deflation, intense shallow seismicity and the end of lava effusion.

Mechanism SystemIn the mechanism system, there are two kinds of mechanism, one is for incident, and the other is for emergency management. Each can be classified into professional mechanism and general mechanism. Professional mechanism refers to the mechanism of specific emergency and has its own particularities. At present, China government divides incidents into four categories: natural disaster, accident, public health incident, and social security incident. Accordingly, each category possesses unique professional mechanism. For example, the mechanism of earthquake is quite different from that of infectious disease. The former is explained by earthquake geophysics, mechanics and other subjects, while the latter relates to pathology, molecular biology, and epidemiology. Moreover, the incidents in the same category may have different mechanism, such as flood and volcanic eruption, which belong to natural disaster but have different cause and consequence.

General mechanism focuses on the universal law of incident and emergency management, such as the general laws of occurrence, development and evolution of incident. It includes four categories: principle mechanism, logic mechanism, process mechanism and operation mechanism. Principle mechanism describes the basic characteristics of incident and emergency management. Logic mechanism describes the intrinsic regularities in the occurrence and evolution of incident and emergency management. Process mechanism emphasizes the rationality in the process of incident evolution and management. Operation mechanism attempts to give a set of regular expression of incident and emergency management taking into account various practical constraints. The structure of mechanism system is shown in Fig. 1.

Fig. 1Hierarchical Composition of Mechanism System

Principle Mechanism

In general, incident is characterized by some properties, which are abruptness, bewilderment, inevitability and contingency. Accordingly, emergency management is required to be timely, exploratory, effective and dynamic. The principle mechanism of incident and emergency management is described in Fig. 2.

Fig. 2 Principle Mechanism of Emergency(incident) and related Management

Abruptness means that incidents always happen suddenly and unexpectedly so that people

are lack of preparation. In order to prevent the situation from being worse and reduce the loss caused by the incident, the rapid and timely response is of critical importance.

Bewilderment is determined by the abruptness property to some extent. Due to the abrupt

occurrence of incidents, we are usually faced with the highly incomplete information and uncertainty factors referring the cause, scale, affecting population and structure of incidents. Moreover, we have no cognition about what to do and what kind of reaction would be effective. In this sense, emergency management is a continuous process of constantly exploration and revision.

Inevitability implies that the development of disaster has its own inherent laws.

Accordingly, the main body of emergency also has the objective laws. Although the information is highly missing when the incident occurs, but the carrier of the incident has its own inherent laws, i.e., under what conditions will cause the accumulation of risks, in what circumstances will trigger the outbreak of incident, as well as how the incident will develop. In other words, the occurrence and evolution of the incident is intrinsically inevitable. In order to deal with the incident, it is a necessity to grasp the inherent regularity of these subjects and consequently take appropriate measures to effectively prevent the further degradation of the situation.

Contingency indicates the development of incidents is hardly foreseeable. Despite the

inherent regularity, the representation of incident is very complicated and unpredictable. Furthermore, the actions taken in the current state will have an impact on the successive stage. Therefore, we have to adjust the strategies with respect to the actual situation in practice. In this sense, emergency management is a dynamic process.

Logic Mechanism

As shown in Fig. 3, incident can be divided into single incident and catenation incident.

For the former, the logic mechanism includes occurrence mechanism and development mechanism. For the latter, we mainly concern about the evolution mechanism including transformation mechanism, spread mechanism, derivation mechanism and coupling mechanism.

Fig. 3 Logic Mechanism of Emergency and Incident

The occurrence mechanism includes gradual occurrence and sudden occurrence concerning whether the information of the incident is known in prior or not. The development mechanism refers to the expansion in space and the enhancement in intensity. Corresponding to the fire, it can expand from one building to another, and enhance from a small scale to a big one.

On one hand, an incident can be induced as the result of other incidents. On the other hand, it may result in other incidents. In this paper, evolution mechanism describes different types of relationship among incidents, such as transformation, spread, derivation and coupling.

Transformation means that one incident induces another. For example, if a building catches fire, it may cause stampede. Spread means incidents in the same kind occur one after another, such as the delay of flight or train in which one delay often causes a series of delays. Different from the traditional term, derivation means the measures taken to deal with one incident cause another incident which is even more serious than the former. For example, during SARS period many people who were injected hormone suffered from femoral head necrosis as a side effect.

Coupling refers to several factors leading to the incident. The snowstorm in southern China in 2008 is a typical incident triggered by a number of coupled events. The coupling factors which play a negative effect on the incident include:

1) The snowstorm occurred in the southern provinces of China, which lack of necessary establishment in case of snow and low temperature.

2) The snowstorm occurred during the Spring Festival when millions of people prepared to return home by highway, railway, flight, and water transport.

3) As the kernel of the city and transport system, the collapse of the power system led to the disruption of transportation, lack of cooked and heated food, suspension of medical care and surgery.

4) The shortage of resources including oil, coal and water occurred instantaneously and directly impacted on the normal life of people.

Under these coupling factors, the impact of snowstorm expanded unrestrictedly in a short time, from local to global, and finally became out of control.

Three kinds of coupling can be defined according to the degree, which

are

In the strong-coupling mode, two factors A and B interact with each other and thus change the whole situation. A typical example is Elnino phenomenon, which is caused by the interaction of atmospheric circulation and ocean circulation.

In the moderate-coupling mode, there exists a unidirectional interaction from A to B so that A impacts the evolution of incident through B indirectly.Concerning the fire, wind can intensify the fire disaster through the influence on the scale and direction of the fire.

In the weak-coupling mode, A and B impact the occurrence and development of the incident simultaneously, however there is no interaction between them. For instance, thousands of passengers stranded in Guangzhou railway for several days during Spring Festival due to the power outage in the event of a snowstorm. Another reason is the Spring Festival, when many people in Guangzhou and its vicinity were ready to go back home for the Chinese New Year. The two independent factors resulted in the increasing number of passengers crowded the station. Otherwise, the consequence was not so serious in the lack of any factor.

Strong-coulpling Moderate-coupling Weak-coupling

Fig. 4 Three Modes of Coupling

Accordingly, each of the logic mechanism of incident corresponds to the strategy in emergency management shown in Fig. 5. The strategies include process block corresponding to the occurrence mechanism, suspension corresponding to the development mechanism, as well as path control, child abandon, optimization, and decoupling corresponding to the four evolution mechanisms respectively.

For example, during the spread of incident, we should adopt the "child abandon" strategy in emergency management. In other words, if the consecutive event is foreseeable, it is reasonable to neglect the first incident.

Decoupling is a solution to cope with coupling mechanism. For strong coupling, due to the interaction between A and B, the decoupling comprises the elimination of the influence of both A to B and B to A. For moderate coupling, it is necessary to decouple the unidirectional interaction from A to B or from B to A. For weak coupling, we just remove the coincidence of A and B in terms of time or space. In fact, the decoupling is not a trivial task, especially for the forces of nature which are unchangeable by human being.

Fig. 5

Logic Mechanism of Emergency Management

Process Mechanism

Process mechanism describes the rationality of

incident and emergency management. Similarly, it is composed of the mechanism for incident and emergency management.

From the

occurrence to

the end, the incident is a process of rational selection, in other words, it gradually develops along the optimal path, consumes the least energy and maximizes the disaster. Process mechanism of incident is shown in Fig. 6.

Fig. 6Process Mechanism of Emergency(Incident)

An incident can be described as a process of energy variation, such as an earthquake or tsunami. At the starting point when a small amount of energy is gathered, if there is a suitable exit, the energy is released in the process of accumulation. Consequently, the energy unreleased is not enough to cause a qualitative change so that the incident will not happen. Otherwise, the

emergency accumulates to a certain degree until the critical point reaches, and then the incident occurs accordingly. Afterwards, the incident spreads to the surrounding space and enhances in the intensity.

In this process, the external environment may play a role of impeding or promoting on the development of incident through the selection of path. There are four kinds of path: chain path, radiation path, migration path and gathering path, which correspond to four evolutions of incident. For example, an earthquake triggers the tsunami and then causes casualties following a chain path. Radiation type denotes that an incident leads to similar incidents, such as an earthquake causing numerous aftershocks in surrounding areas. Furthermore, an earthquake will lead to a variety of secondary incidents such as casualty, environmental damage, social and psychological panic, which is a complex of different paths and form a tree or network path. Nevertheless, the common characteristic of different paths is the least energy consumption causes the greatest losses.

If the incident does not cause secondary disasters, the energy releases gradually until the termination. Otherwise, they will follow a similar process of path selection. For example, during the path selection of a fire, if there is no flammable material nearby, the fire becomes weaker and finally dies out. However, under suitable condition (wind or flammable material) the fire becomes more serious (spread with wind or kindle the flammable material). On the contrary, it may cause explosions which release some energy. The reactions probably lead to the collapse of buildings and casualty of people until all reactions terminate.

Fig. 7Process Mechanism of Emergency Management

As shown in Fig. 7, process mechanism of emergency management (on the right side) is correspondence with that of incident (on the left side). If the early-warning is successful, i.e., the accumulation of energy is detected, measures in this stage is to prevent the accumulation of energy or change the critical point of the incident. The purpose is to make the energy fail to reach the critical point, so that the incident will be nipped in the bud before occurrence.

After the occurrence of incidents, a large amount of energy releases and the scale increases accordingly. In order to prevent the spread and transformation of disasters, it is necessary to take measures from the source, propagation path, and susceptible material. At the source, we can use corresponding objects to neutralize the energy and control the development of the situation. For example, the firemen extinguish the fire with water. Other two measures include to cut off the route of transmission and to transfer susceptible material. For example, in SARS epidemic period, the patients are isolated so that the virus can not spread. Meanwhile, susceptiblepopulation was protected from the infection sources.

If the measures are effective, the development of emergency will become weak gradually. After the aftermath disposal, in the summarization stage the errors are corrected in order to cope with the next disaster. If secondary disasters are caused, they will follow a similar process of path selection, therefore, the process mechanism of emergency management also follows a similar process until the last disaster is processed.

Operation Mechanism

The operation mechanism of incident is based on the process mechanism, taking into consideration various constraints (such as the existence of fire wind, the scale and direction of wind etc.) and influence of emergency measures. Hence, the incident can only seek for the relatively optimal path under a variety of constraints.

Similarly, there are a variety of constraints in each step of operation mechanism of emergency management. We can not take the measures arbitrarily, instead we are inevitably restricted by the available resources, geographical environment, transport condition, time, technical condition and other factors.

CONCLUSIONS

Emergency management is an important topic attracting considerable research from both academic and practical areas. The mechanisms which disclose the intrinsic characteristic of incident and emergency management play a crucial role to make effective decisions for the purpose of decreasing the harm caused by incidents. This paper establishes the mechanism system for incident and emergency management. Four general mechanisms, namely principle mechanism, logic mechanism, process mechanism and operation mechanism are discussed. The mechanism of incident describes the whole process of incident from the incubation, occurrence, development, regression, and termination. The general rules of emergency management provide decision makers with theoretical basis in the full life cycle of emergency management. In addition, the evolution mechanism is helpful to prevent the occurrence of secondary disasters which are more serious in many cases. The evolution paths described by the process mechanism correspond to four types of secondary disasters. In order to prevent secondary disasters and control the scale of their impact, we must understand the reasons of the occurrence and evolution of secondary disasters.

This paper gives a preliminary description of mechanism as a starting point. In the future research plan, the occurrence mechanism and coupling mechanism will be formularized in mathematical models. Elaborate study will be conducted on the description of operation mechanism based on process mechanism. In addition, the feasibility of mechanisms will be investigated in guiding the management of incidents in practical applications.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge the financial grant of Head Fund of Institute of Policy and Management (#O700811J01) and a cooperation research project between Chinese Academy of Science and Beijing Municipal Institute of Labour Protection.

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