Coordination in Rapidly Evolving Disaster Response Systems

Assessing the changing dynamic between the demand that is placed on a community by cumulative exposure to hazards and the capacity of the community to mitigate or respond to that risk represents a central problem in estimating the community’s resilience to disaster. The authors present an initial effort to simulate the dynamic between increasing demand and decreasing capacity in an actual disaster response system to determine the fragility of the system, or the point at which the system fails. The results show that access to core information enhances efficiency of response actions and increases coordination throughout the network of responding organizations.