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"Disasters and the Theory of Emergency Management" published on by Oxford University Press.

The views of Anthony Giddens, sociology professor at the U of Cambridge, England, on modern society are presented. His structuration theory explains how individuals create & propagate rules that allow social systems to control their lives. New worldwide modern institutional powers, eg, media, business, & military, affect everyday life, so that personal decisions must balance issues of risk & trust relative to global threats of disasters. Only enforcing the general will to change the agencies controlling calamitous forces will resolve these dilemmas. A vision of a future society is presented, one in which individuals live within their means, seeking fulfillment rather than material & property acquisition. M. Malas

Nine out of ten modern constitutions contain explicit emergency provisions, describing who can call a state of emergency (and under which conditions) and the additional powers government enjoys under a state of emergency. As states of emergency typically allocate additional powers to the executive, they lend themselves easily to abuse and provide political incentives to declare emergencies. In this paper, we analyze under what conditions government behavior under a state of emergency deviates from constitutional provisions and a de jure/de facto gap thus emerges. Such a gap can be caused by the unlawful declaration of an emergency, the noncompliance with constitutional provisions in the course of an emergency, or the perpetuation of a state of emergency beyond the constitutionally defined length. Based on a novel dataset comprising 853 emergency declarations, 115 are identified as unlawful. We find that events caused by political turmoil are more likely to be followed by an unlawful emergency than natural disasters. Autocratic governments are more likely to renege against the constitution than democratic governments. Focusing on the 97 emergencies declared as reactions to domestic events, we also find that bicameral systems are more likely to suffer from unlawful states of emergencies than unicameral ones, as are countries hit by recessions, and countries where the constitution justifies emergencies under more numerous conditions.

This study examines the economic, political, institutional, & demographic factors associated with local emergency management growth. The findings from a pooled cross-sectional time-series analysis in 67 counties in Florida show that, in all three government forms (the council-manager, commission, & council-elected executive forms), the vote for the Democratic presidential & gubernatorial candidates has a negative association with emergency management expending. The findings indicate that council-manager counties tend to spend less than counties with the commission form or council-elected executive form, but council-elected executive counties spend more on emergency management. The findings reveal that county vulnerability to natural disasters & population growth have positive associations with emergency management growth. 4 Tables, 53 References. Adapted from the source document.

This paper provides substantive understanding of how routine emergency service performance is affected by diversion of resources to a disaster occurring concurrently in a surrounding area. Based on operations strategy models, this study identifies crucial infrastructural and integration components necessary to develop dynamic capabilities for the primary responsibility of responding effectively to routine emergencies during a disaster. A database from a local fire district is used to explore the impact of a wildfire disaster on the operational performance measures of response time and total time. The results of multivariate multiple regression show the impact of the disaster occurrence on these performance measures for a range of incident types in the time periods before, during, and after the wildfire. Findings suggest key drivers of dynamic resource capabilities necessary for improving routine incident operational performance. Implications for emergency services managers include the need to develop and implement data‐driven investigation and review, focused responder training, resident and business engagement, and a tiered mutual aid system. Contributions include development of a framework explaining the impact of disaster occurrences and identification of important dynamic resource capabilities. This paper goes beyond prior research by exploring the impact of disasters on routine emergency performance measures and identifying resource capabilities necessary to alleviate the impact on performance.

Security has always been as much a problem for modern democracies as it has been a solution. The tension between security and democracy, safety and legitimate rule, has been at the center of modern politics going as far back as Hobbes's leviathan state, where fear above all else "is the passion to be reckoned upon." But since September 11, the pursuit of complete security has done considerable damage to our democratic process. We will never be able to truly escape the risks and uncertainty of modern life. Rousseau was right: complete security is impossible. But if fear is to continue to be a permanent condition in our lives, then let's make sure democracy is as well.

Purpose
– The purpose of this paper is to present and apply a methodology that optimally assigns emergency response services (ERS) stations in Peloponnesus, Greece that was severely hit by wildfires in 2007, in an effort to describe the actual emergency response in this disaster and identify disaster management possibilities that can arise from the optimal allocation of the existing fire stations.


Design/methodology/approach
– The methodology concerns the development of an objective function that aims to minimize maximum and average response times of ERS stations and the evaluation of developed scenarios. Simulated annealing is used for the minimization of the objective function, providing near-optimal solutions with low computation times for medium-scale networks.


Findings
– The findings concern the comparison of average and maximum response times of ERS stations to hearths of fire, based on their actual and optimal allocation. They reveal an overall reduction in the average and maximum response time by 20 and 30 percent, respectively, for the entire region, while there is a reduction of 15 and 35 percent in the average and maximum response time for the locations affected by the 2007 wildfires.


Research limitations/implications
– The methodology is formulated as a facility location problem with unitary demand and unlimited capacity in the stations, which means that the allocation does not take into account simultaneous events.


Originality/value
– The paper fulfills an identified need to apply innovative research solutions to actual case studies in order to identify existing gaps and future disaster management possibilities.