Effectiveness Evaluation Model for Public Alert Systems

Mulero Chaves Javier and Párraga Niebla Cristina

Effectiveness of alerting systems can be understood from different points of view, varying from the economic standpoint to the operational perspective. This paper presents a method for evaluating the effectiveness of public alert systems, assuming they are effective if the alert messages can be properly received and understood by the population at risk. Only under these conditions, the population at risk can be informed about the facts and the recommended protective action to be taken. The chosen approach for this analysis is a qualitative/quantitative method to evaluate the capability of different communication channels used to alert the population to fulfill a number of requirements and understand their complementarities if a multi-channel approach is adopted.

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An analysis of the disease spectrum of children after the Lushan earthquake in China

Shike Hou, Haojun Fan, Lv Qi, Ziquan Liu, Yongzhong Zhang and Hui Ding

An earthquake with a magnitude of 7.0 struck Lushan in Sichuan Province in China on April 20, 2013. Uniformed pediatricians arrived at the area where the epicenter was located to provide emergency relief care for children 10 days after the earthquake. The authors investigated the features of the disease spectrum of children at early time in a major earthquake disaster and provided basis information which will be useful for the arrangement of the medical resources of pediatrics in the medical relief after Lushan earthquake in similar situation in the future. A total of 220 case files were classified and analyzed. These files provided information regarding pediatric patients who were diagnosed and treated in the mobile hospital established by the Affiliated Hospital of Logistical University of Chinese People’s Armed Police Forces in Baoxing from April 20, 2013 to April 30, 2013.The demographic data of all these patients were collected and the disease spectrum was analyzed. Children’s ages differed. A total of 59 patients were neonates, infants, and toddlers (27%); 111 were school-aged children (50%) and 50 were adolescents (23%). Common diseases and injuries include respiratory tract infection, dermatosis and trauma which were observed 10 days after the earthquake. Trauma was mainly accidental injury. The morbidity rate of infectious diseases was low.

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Research on the Tectonic Activation of Anninghe Rift

Liu Junqi and Li Yusheng

Formation and development of continental rifts are related to some processes deep in the earth. This understanding is important for discussion on the earth’s development. Anninghe rift is located on the western edge of Yangtze Block next to Tibetan Plateau, along the axis of a continental paleorift zone, Panxi paleorift. Anninghe rift’s development was completed at the Cretaceous. Recent studies have found that an upward mantle convection system existed since the late Pliocene in the deep lithosphere of a long and narrow area controlled by Anninghe fault. Lithospheric temperature distribution in the area has characteristics similar to that in Baikal and other modern rifts. A mantle upwelling area was in a constant state of “pull-subsidence.” Brittle rock mass of the shallow crust cracked into the new secondary subsidence blocks. A thick lacustrine sedimentary sequence of continental subsidence type developed. These all indicate that Anninghe rift is in an obvious tectonic activation state. It is believed that the tectonic activation of Anninghe rift has been produced by both horizontal squeeze from a plastic flow of the upper crust and expansion from mantle uplift. Notably the pressure from the plastic flow of the upper crust is slightly greater than the expansion stress from the uplifting of lithosphere. Under this specific geodynamic environment, whether the tectonic activation of Anninghe rift can continue depends on the thermal motion rate of deep mantle materials and the eastward migration of the crustal materials of Tibetan Plateau.

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Mitigating drought impacts on agricutural productivity through efficient irrigation technology using GIS based parametric evaluation approach in Namakkal district, Tamilnadu

Saranya P. and Krishnaveni M.

Drought is one of the natural disasters that has been occurring in semiarid regions like India due to erratic and scarce rainfall. The major sector vulnerable to drought is agriculture because the water level has been declining year to year. It directly affects the productivity of land and water. Modern irrigation techniques like micro irrigation enhance the output and productivity of soil and water to some extent compared to conventional methods with minimum available resources. Hence, within the context of drought and its effects on agricultural productivity, the present study has been undertaken and it concentrates on demarcating the potential areas suitable for different irrigation methods using FAO parametric evaluation approach and Geo informatics techniques in the semi-arid region of Namakkal district, Tamilnadu. The suitability map showed that the 25.63% (62572.04 Ha) of the studied area was highly suitable for drip irrigation and there were no highly suitable areas for surface irrigation method. Furthermore, some of the land units covering an area of 1.09 % (2599.32 Ha) were unsuitable for surface irrigation and there were no unsuitable areas for drip irrigation. The outcomes showed that most of the areas were more suited for drip irrigation compared to surface irrigation. The resulting map demonstrated that by applying the drip irrigation method instead of surface irrigation - 63.49% (155007.86 Ha) of the study area’s agricultural productivity will improve. Thus, this study is able to prove conclusively that drought effects on agricultural productivity can be mitigated by means of modern micro irrigation methods.

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Evaluation of incompatible hazard for TBPO mixed with inorganic acid or base by thermal analysis technology

Yihong Chang, Yunting Tsai, Yongda Pu, Weipin Pan and Chimin Shu

Tert-Butyl-peroxy-2-ethylhexanoate (TBPO), an organic peroxide (OP), is broadly applied as initiator of polymerization reaction of ethylene, styrene, acrylonitrile and methyl acrylate. The thermal unstable bond (O–O) of OPs is easily decomposed releasing amounts of heat based on external thermal source and catalytic substance such as acid, base, or metal ions, resulting in the unexpected fire and explosion. Our aim was to explore the incompatible hazard for TBPO mixed with common inorganic acid or base such as HCl, H3PO4, HNO3, H2SO4, or Mg(OH)2, by non-isothermal calorimeter, differential scanning calorimetry (DSC), isothermal calorimeter, thermal activity monitor III (TAM III) and typical kinetic model, obtaining various thermal stability parameters such as exothermic onset temperature (T0), exothermic maximum temperature (Tmax), heat of decomposition (ΔHd), and activation energy (Ea) that can be used to evaluate the fundamental incompatible hazard information for TBPO. According to experimental results, when TBPO is mixed with 6 N HNO3 and 6 N NaOH, it indeed increases thermal hazard than pure TBPO. Therefore, we avoid using or mixing HNO3 and NaOH under abnormal conditions during TBPO’s storage, transportations, manufacturing and discard process.

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Measurement and Assessment of Full-Scale Fire Experiment in Wind Generator Compartment using Water Mist System

Yi-Liang Shu and Chen-Wei Chiu

Through extensive research and testing, water mist systems have gained worldwide acceptance as an effective solution in many applications such as those that involve flammable liquids, electrical equipment, semiconductor facilities and outdoor transformers. The NFPA 750 standard defines “water mist” as a water spray discharged through a nozzle in which 99% of the water spray’s volume comprises water particles less than 1,000 microns in diameter. Wind generators have become very popular lately as a means to generate power for today’s life. The height of wind generator is always 60 to 70 meters. If the cabinet is in fire, it will be hard to response for fire fighter. A fixed fire suppression system is a good solution for fire protection. For the good performance of water mist system, this study wants to develop a water mist system for wind generator fire protection. Fire parameters of the water mist system test include exposed or unexposed fire source, with or without openings and un-sheltered or sheltered fire source in the center. Through series of full-scale fire tests, the water mist system is proofed to have good effectiveness on fire suppression in wind generator fire.

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Analyses of 3D animation fire scene reconstruction in a nightclub

Yi-Hong Chang, Chen-Wei Chiu and Chi-Jan Huang

3D animation reconstructions of fire scenarios are essential for the development of fire simulation methodologies that can provide the basis for fire reconstructions for CFD researchers. However, 3D animation techniques using various fire parameters underlying fire physical equations are not intuitive enough to be readily mastered. This study adopted PyroSim, an interactive model combining FDS with Smokeview, especially for the purpose of using parallel processing approaches aimed at reducing the difficulty of establishing the model and also at reducing the possible errors in space establishment and border condition definitions. When comparing 3D animation simulation results with a full-scale nightclub fire construction experiment in USA, this study demonstrated substantial predictive powers for several curves and 3D animations of fire parameters including temperature, heat release rate, flame height, smoke thickness/length, and oxygen concentration. Consequently, this study not only provides applications for fire simulation in actual fire scene investigations but also proposes an approach for interactive applications and real-time requests.

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New Insights into the cause of Regional Geohazards in Central Taiwan

Cheng-Yu Ku, Yung-Hsien Tsai, Chiu-Hua Jhong and Huang-Cheng Yang

This paper presents new insights into the cause of regional geohazards from the Chi-Chi earthquake and typhoon events in the Da-Chia river watershed located in central Taiwan. To explore the coupling between the Chi-Chi earthquake and sequential geohazards in the Da-Chia river watershed, analyses of rainfall characteristics, rainfall-induced landslides, and debris flow formation from rainfall-induced landslides were conducted. Our findings indicate that the regional geohazards in the Da-Chia river watershed were mainly caused by the huge amount of sparsely deposited materials from landslides occurred by the Chi-Chi earthquake. Rapidly increasing water pressure caused by typhoon events with specific rainfall intensity provided a powerful force that moved the sparsely deposited materials into gullies and then triggered the debris flow movement. Furthermore, results obtained from the spatial distribution of rainfall in the study region demonstrate that the regional debris flow hazards in the Da-Chia river watershed are strongly related to the spatial distribution of rainfalls.

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Paralyzing Terrorist Network: Removing Pivot Actors and Predicting Second Leaders to curb Future Disaster

Karthika Subbaraj and Bose Sundan

Terrorism is considered to be a violent act which in the name of religion creates fear among the innocent people. It poses a great threat to homeland security. Its transition as ‘net-war’ demands the identification and isolation of crucial players and empowering any future crisis circumstances. The proposed SpyMe system tags a set of elites using the role based algorithm that employs actor and relational significances. Such actor removal will cease the information flow by isolating the actors within the network. It overcomes the conventional problem of losing vital information due to the negligence of persisting relations among the terrorist. It defines a naïve weighted measure called as Relationship Centrality (CR) to tag pivot actors. The fragmentation analysis is performed by removing the predominant cutset of actors. It predicts the second leader after removing the pivot actor set and determines the degree of damage caused to the covert network. This measure will help the analyst to determine the chances of the covert organization to deploy an attack in the future. The resulting fragmented network is evaluated, depending on the number of isolated components and the size of each fragment. The performance of the system is experimented on the September 11, 2001 attack.

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Experimental Investigation for Wave Run-up and Run-down on Tetrapod-armored Rubble-mound Structure

Lee Jong-In, Bae Ilro and Shin Sungwon

In this study, hydraulic model tests were conducted in the two-dimensional large wave flume and the three-dimensional wave basin to understand wave run-up on different configurations of tetrapod-armored rubble mound coastal structures under the non-overtopping irregular wave conditions. The variation of wave run-up level depending on the number of Tetrapod layers and the incident wave angle are mainly focused in the experiments. The collected run-up level data based on the different configurations of coastal structures were compared with the data presented by the previous studies. In a large wave flume, the experiments on variation of the number of armor layers were conducted to investigate the effect of armor layer thickness on the wave run-up. In a three-dimensional wave basin, the experiments on the wave run-up distribution along the curved section and straight section of the structure were conducted to figure out three-dimensional effects on the wave run-up in terms of the incident wave angles and the configuration of the structure. Through the three-dimensional hydraulic tests, the amplification of wave run-up at curved section of structure has been identified. On the other hand, the wave run-up level on the four-layer armored structure showed almost no big difference compared to that on the two-layer armored structure.

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A simple Wireless Real-time Environment Monitoring system for Safety of Underground Miners

Dohare Y. S., Maity T., Das P. S. and Paul P. S.

This paper presents a cost-effective, low-power wireless real-time environment monitoring network for highly secure and reliable data transmission from potentially hazardous underground mines. ZigBee protocol based wireless monitoring system is developed that effectively monitors mines environment parameters such as temperature, humidity, concentration of gases like methane, CO2 etc. Wireless monitoring system is created through joining of several nodes and they are interfaced with miniature size sensors. The wireless sensor network is created through these sensor nodes which wirelessly transfer data to a master node. The sensor node consists of low power 8051 microcontroller core and low power transceiver integrated in a single on chip. Smaller size sensor node is suitably deployed as an attachment with miner’s helmet. Sensor nodes help to collect real time data from underground mines and transmitted to the surface. Through use of sensor network analyzer tool, the analysis of encrypted data and online view of existing node network are also made. Data management software is developed to display and store those data online both in graphical and numerical forms.

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