BACKGROUND Although disaster causes distress, many disaster victims do not develop long-term psychopathology. Others report benefits after traumatic experiences (posttraumatic growth). The objective of this study was to examine demographic and hurricane-related predictors of resilience and posttraumatic growth. METHODS We interviewed 222 pregnant southern Louisiana women and 292 postpartum wo...

INTRODUCTION Recent years have witnessed community disaster resilience becoming one of the most heavily supported and advocated approach to disaster risk management. However, its application has been influenced by the lack of assessment tools. This study reviews studies conducted using the resilience concept and examines the tools, models, and methods adopted. It examines the domains, indicator...

The September 2001 attacks and the 2011 Japan earthquake and tsunami disaster are examples of manmade and natural disasters which have revealed the importance of having a disaster management system in place. A great deal of advisory and policy documents need to be developed by various government authorities. The Intelligent Transportation Systems and Services (ITSS) are set to play a crucial ro...

Risk has been defined, for management purposes, as the potential economic, social and environmental consequences of hazardous events that may occur in a specified period of time. However, in the past, the concept of risk has been defined in a fragmentary way in many cases, according to each scientific discipline involved in its appraisal. From the perspective of this article, risk requires a mu...

Due to persistent and serious threats from natural disasters around the globe, many have turned to resilience and vulnerability research to guide disaster preparation, recovery, and adaptation decisions. In response, scholars and practitioners have put forth a variety of disaster indices, based on quantifiable metrics, to gauge levels of resilience and vulnerability. However, few indices are em...

Modern critical infrastructure (CI) systems are tightly coupled, resulting in unprecedented complexity and difficulty to predict, limit and control the consequences of disruptions caused by hazards. Therefore, a paradigm shift in disaster risk management is needed: instead of focusing on predicting events, resilience needs to be improved as a basis for adequate response to any event. This paper...

In the last few decades, disaster risk reduction programs and climate initiatives across the globe have focused largely on the intimate connections between vulnerability, recovery, adaptation, and coping mechanisms. Recent focus, however, is increasingly paid to community resilience. Community, placed at the intersection between the household and national levels of social organization, is cruci...