Describing a community
The community consists of the people and property that you intend to protect in your emergency management work. Thus you must define what a community is for your purposes . You will find if you re-read the scope section of your Project Definition that you will have partially, if not completely, described the limits of your community.
To refresh your memory, the community could be:
- people living in a geographical area;
- people in an administrative area (such as the area administered by a local or regional government);
- an activity such as a recreational activity, forestry, manufacturing or transport;
- a building or complex of buildings;
- an organisation, and perhaps its clients;
- a particular group of people in society.
Faced with the task of describing a community, there are a number of techniques to help you. One is to determine which aspects of the community are worth describing for the purposes of emergency management.
Let us start with the description of a community that is a group of people living in either a geographical area or an area defined by administrative boundaries. What are the aspects of such a community that may be relevant to emergency management? List what you believe are the important ones here before reading on.
Figure 6.2 shows aspects can be used to describe a community of people in a given geographical area.
Figure 6.2
Describing a community
Source: Adapted from Natural Disasters Organisation 1992, Australian emergency manual - Community planning guide, Canberra.
Why are these aspects relevant to emergency management? How do these compare to the aspects you listed earlier? The following discussion will make it clear why the four major aspects above are of major relevance.
Demography
Let's start with demography, which is the study of the statistics of human populations. There is usually an enormous amount of data available on the population of any given community, but only some of this data is relevant to emergency management. The relevant data concerns the number of people in your area of study, their distribution across the area, and any concentrations of vulnerable groups. Such groups may be vulnerable due to age (either the young or the aged), their mobility (whether or not they have vehicles or other modes of transport) or due to disabilities.
How does one obtain such data? The reading in Activity 6.2, although slightly dated, explains a useful access system in Australia.
|
The other side of community vulnerability, is the ability of the community to manage hazards and risks. It is generally assumed that those who have a realistic perception of the hazards and associated risks around them, and those who are aware of the measures necessary to manage those hazards and risks, are better able to cope with emergencies. Certain communities will also have particular skills that are useful in emergency management. For example, one would expect a mining community to be better able to cope following storm damage or an earthquake than the people in a city, and rural communities in general are more resilient than urban communities due to greater self-sufficiency.
Culture
The culture of a community, including their traditions, ethnicity and social values, is very relevant to emergency management. The basic attitudes of a community towards hazards and risks will be strongly influenced by their attitudes towards nature, technology, the causation of accidents and emergencies, and the value of mitigating or contingent actions. Some communities, for example, accept that lives will be lost due to emergencies, and are unwilling to take mitigating or contingent actions. Their attitude may be based on a belief that all events are controlled by a supreme being, or by fate, and thus that action is either a waste of time or actually blasphemous. Other communities that believe they control their own destiny are more likely to attempt to manage hazards and risks.
A further possible attitude is due, in part, to the flood of foreign aid that may flow into a country following a disaster. Some communities may consider disasters as opportunities for reconstruction using foreign money and materials, rather than as problems. Consider the development opportunities that were provided in South East Asia as a result of the Tsunami disaster in 2005 and the influx of foreign aid in its aftermath.
Economy
The economy is a part of the community that requires protection, and the more sensitive and vulnerable sections of the economy will require some consideration in emergency management.
Consider the implications of a major disaster on investments and tourism in a given area. It is likely that a disaster that causes considerable structural and environmental damage would devastate the local tourism industry. Investment may also suffer, due to a perception on the part of potential or current investors that the risks in the area are too high. Industries and trade could also suffer due to a restriction in the access to both goods and markets caused by disruption to transport and communications.
If you take the case of an industry, and consider the possible effects of an emergency on its operations, you might like to consider:
- vulnerability of essential records (either on paper or in computer retrieval systems);
- continuation of business;
- damage to expensive equipment;
- loss of revenue;
- loss of client confidence.
Infrastructure
The infrastructure of a community is often highly vulnerable to hazards, particularly natural disasters. Your risk assessment should consider any possible damage to power generation and distribution systems, water supplies, communications systems, transportation systems and other essential utility services etc. These are often referred to as 'engineering lifelines' , and factors relevant to them are:
- the possible extent of damage;
- alternative means of supplying the service; and
- the amount of time repairs would take;
- the cost of repairs.
It is important to have a basic description of the government structure, and service and community organisations, as these will provide the mechanism for emergency management actions.
Should you consider other characteristics?
If you believe that there are aspects of your community other than those described above that are relevant to emergency management, then by all means analyse these. Do not be trapped into using only the aspects described in this topic.
So, we have seen that four major aspects should be considered when describing characteristics of a community-demography, culture, economy, and infrastructure. Other characteristics may need to be considered, dependant upon the particular nature of the community.
Examples of community analyses
You will find three examples of community analysis in your set of Readings , one from a hazard analysis of needlestick injury in a public hospital, another from a hazard analysis of traffic accidents on a bridge, and the other from a hazard analysis of tourist boat operations.
Read
Reading 6.2: Extract from Hazard analysis report of tourist operations in the Macquarie Harbour and Gordon River areas.
Reading 6.3: Extract from Hazard analysis of needlestick injury in acute hospital setting: Implications for nursing staff at Royal Hobart Hospital .
Reading 6.4: Extract from Hazard analysis of Tasman Bridge .
As you would have noticed these three examples vary greatly in the depth and breadth of their analysis, due to the relevance of community analysis to the hazard they were studying.
Community and vulnerability mapping
As seen in the article by Salter and Tarrant (Reading 6.1), detailed information on a community can often be effectively documented using maps. This is particularly so when selected parameters that have been used to describe the community vary systematically over a geographical area.
It is also possible, although expensive and time-consuming, to develop vulnerability maps. These maps overlay those aspects of the community (and often of the environment) that are vulnerable or at risk with the hazard information. This provides an estimation of the degree of harm or loss that may occur. However, for the reasons alluded to above, most community analyses do not extend as far as vulnerability mapping.
Even if you cannot develop vulnerability maps, you can still use the concept of mapping as an analogy. In determining the likely effects of hazards (which we will address in the next topic) you should think about how the community is spatially related to the hazard.
The next reading considers the distribution of vulnerable groups in a typical Australian city and the implications knowledge of such demographics have for emergency management.
|