Development of a Method to Evaluate Disasters

Abstract

Disaster are diversified in all aspects: they range from storms and tornadoes to earthquakes, tsunamis and cyclones. They do affect a range of countries. Most of these disasters are geographically dependent. The overall response depends on many factors including the type of disaster, the types of organizations, the geography of the location, the people involved in the rescue efforts, among many others. For example, is Japan is better prepared than Nepal or Haiti newlineto handle a disaster in terms of providing immediate relief? The responses are multidimensional and are assumed to be effective. From a service quality perspective, groups of responders provide service to victims. Effectiveness and efficiency of this service are perhaps two popular outcome measures. Unfortunately, published study on evaluation of these responders are sparse to non-existent. In order to understand how, in general, the evaluation could be done, it was decided to study the response to common disasters that occur in the region, which were floods. The intent of this study was first to identify some of the factors that has a significant effect on how effective the flood relief effort was, and then develop a method for assessing the effectiveness and efficiency (service quality) of both the responders and newlinevictims. A reasonable method is proposed where all the attributes and the outcome measures are planning to be measured. The input variables also included external and internal factors that could have influenced the way the disaster relief was conducted. The factors that were identified newlinebased on the review of literature, resulted in two questionnaires being designed, one to survey the victims and another to survey the responders, or the people providing the relief work. Experts were consulted on the survey instruments before settling on the final version. Two different surveys were done on the victims and responders of two recent floods in India the Chennai floods of 2015 and the Kerala Floods of 2018, as part of the primary data..