Search results

This paper is an investigation of the volume, nature and tone of news media coverage of the federal Lifeline Program from its inception to 2018. It aims to examine whether news media coverage is correlated with significant episodes of reform in the program.

Using the ProQuest Major Dailies database, articles covering the “Lifeline Program” were analyzed. Specifically, a quantitative codebook was developed, based on the literature, and four coders were trained to systematically analyze the 124 articles that discussed the program between 1985 and 2018.

The findings suggest that reforms in the program were preceded by significantly higher volumes of media coverage; however, the analysis is unable to confirm that negative media coverage has a stronger agenda setting effect. In addition, no significant difference was found between positive and negative news stories in their use of research-based information.

This study is interdisciplinary in its ability to combine policy and journalism studies as a mechanism to understand the relationship between the two forces.

Lifelines (also referred to as critical infrastructure) are referred to here as the essential infrastructure and services that support the life of our community. In a disaster response and recovery situation, provision of Lifelines, is essential. New Zealand has several mechanisms to improve the responses of lifeline service providers in a disaster situation, including pre‐event planning and coordination groups and legislative provisions for timely response in an emergency. Currently, waste management is not formally included in either the coordination process or the legislative provisions for Lifelines. This paper aims to address whether or not waste management should be included in these.

Qualitative and semi‐qualitative matrix‐based assessments were used to determine the relative importance of provision of waste management services in a disaster‐recovery situation.

The paper argues that waste management should be included in Lifeline planning in New Zealand. Organisational complexity in the waste management system and the likely need to expand pre‐disaster waste management services to deal with large amounts of disaster generated waste, however, mean that inclusion in the legislative provisions for Lifeline service providers would be challenging.

The research context is specific to New Zealand; however, the general challenges, principles and overall approach and may be transferable to other jurisdictions.

Organisational and regulatory approaches recommended in this paper, if adopted, will help waste and emergency managers respond and recover more effectively in a disaster situation.

This paper is the first to attempt to examine in detail the importance of waste management on disaster recovery in New Zealand. The findings of the paper are of relevance to countries with similar organisational and legal structures.

This paper aims to propose a system for automatically forming ad hoc networks using mobile phones and battery-powered wireless routers for emergency situations. The system also provides functions to send emergency messages and identify the location of victims based on the network topology information.

Optimized link state routing protocol is used to instantly form an ad hoc emergency network based on WiFi signals from mobile phones of the victims, backup battery-powered wireless routers preinstalled in buildings and mobile devices deployed by search and rescue teams. The proposed system is also designed to recover from partial crash of network and nodes lost.

Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed system in terms of battery life, transmission distance and noises.

A novel message routing schedule is proposed for conserving battery life. A novel function to estimate the location of a mobile device which sent an emergency message is proposed in this paper.

The authors present the impact of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic on community lifelines. The state machinery has several departments to secure essential lifelines during disasters and epidemics. Many countries have formed national disaster management authorities to deal with manmade and natural disasters. Typical lifelines include food, water, safety and security, continuity of services, medicines and healthcare equipment, gas, oil and electricity supplies, telecommunication services, transportation means and education system. Supply chain systems are often affected by disasters, which should have alternative sources and routes. Doctors, nurses and medics are front-line soldiers against diseases during pandemics.

The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed how much we all are connected yet unprepared for natural disasters. Political leaders prioritize infrastructures, education but overlook the health sector. During the recent pandemic, developed countries faced more mortalities, fatalities and casualties than developing countries. This work surveys the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on health, energy, environment, industry, education and food supply lines.

The COVID-19 pandemic caused 7% reductions in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions during global lockdowns. In addition, COVID-19 has affected social fabric, behaviors, cultures and official routines. Around 2.84 bn doses have been administrated, with approximately 806 m people (10.3% of the world population) are fully vaccinated around the world to date. Most developed vaccines are being evaluated for new variants like alpha, beta, gamma, epsilons and delta first detected in the UK, South Africa, Brazil, USA and India. The COVID-19 pandemic has affected all sectors in society, yet this paper critically reviews the impact of COVID-19 on health and energy lifelines.

This paper critically reviews the health and energy lifelines during pandemic COVID-19 and explains how these essential services were interrupted.

This paper critically reviews the health and energy lifelines during pandemic COVID-19 and explains how these essential services were interrupted.

‘Lifelines’ for short: the title that, since October 1975, has demarcated BBC Radio's adult education programmes (weekdays 6.30 — 7.30 pm medium wave) from the surrounding, and quite different, culture of Radio 3. Successor to the seemingly more demanding, and perhaps more peremptory, Study on 3, Lifelines witnesses to the prevailing new emphasis on the provision of learning stimuli for the non‐joiners, the educationally disadvantaged and disaffected. It no longer assumes ready motivation to study, but anticipates willingness — and ability — to learn, at least so long as that learning is life‐orientated rather than subject‐dominated.

The purpose of this paper is to trial the application of a criticality framework for roads in an urban environment. The failure or disruption of critical transport routes can have substantial impacts on the economy and societal well-being. Determining the criticality of transport routes is thus of crucial importance for infrastructure providers, city planners and emergency management officials, as it enables appropriate resilience assessments and targeted improvement/intervention and investment strategies to be conducted.

The authors summarise the proposed criticality framework developed by Hughes (2016) for road networks and apply and validate the framework to an area containing 907 km of roads in the central Auckland area of New Zealand. Following an initial trial of the framework, alterations were made to the framework logic, which included the introduction of a new criticality level to account for some roads providing minimal direct societal and economic benefit and a rationalisation step to ensure that road sections always link to others with either an equal or higher criticality.

The modified framework and five-level criticality scale, when applied to the study area in central Auckland, is suitable for determining critical roads and can therefore assist with future assessments of road infrastructure resilience.

The framework also has the potential to be applied more widely and adapted so that it is applicable for determining the criticality of other infrastructure types and in other settings, which would allow improved assessments within and across sectors.

Economic modeling issues for measuring damages and losses from disasters and their impacts are complex. The questions surrounding the potential economic effects of a disaster have been studied and discussed in various aspects. Input‐output analysis has been employed in many studies to measure and evaluate the economic impacts of disasters, mainly because of the ability to reflect the structure of regional economy in great detail. Whereas they provide useful information regarding the economic impacts and consequences and about the resource allocation strategies to minimize the losses and impacts, many of these studies have failed to investigate the dynamic nature of impact path over space and time, due to the difficulties to obtain such data and also to the static nature of input‐output framework. In order to analyze the spatial impacts of a disaster, Miyazawa's extension to the conventional input‐output framework is employed and is applied for the case of the Great Hanshin Earthquake.