The Disaster Research Center at the University of Delaware:: The World's First Center for the Social Scientific Study of Disaster.

The Disaster Research Center (DRC) was founded in 1963 to help American government decision makers understand how citizens would respond in times of crisis. Since then, DRC personnel have embarked upon some 700 quick-response deployments to better understand the social and physical aspects of disaster mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery. This research has taken DRC faculty and students around the world, from New York City, conducting research that explored and documented the city's response to and recovery from 9/11, to the Kathmandu Valley to better understand mothering during disaster evacuation after the 2015 Nepal Earthquake.

An Integrated Scenario Ensemble-Based Framework for Hurricane Evacuation Modeling: Part 2-Hazard Modeling.

Hurricane track and intensity can change rapidly in unexpected ways, thus making predictions of hurricanes and related hazards uncertain. This inherent uncertainty often translates into suboptimal decision-making outcomes, such as unnecessary evacuation. Representing this uncertainty is thus critical in evacuation planning and related activities.

An Integrated Scenario Ensemble-Based Framework for Hurricane Evacuation Modeling: Part 1-Decision Support System.

This article introduces a new integrated scenario-based evacuation (ISE) framework to support hurricane evacuation decision making. It explicitly captures the dynamics, uncertainty, and human-natural system interactions that are fundamental to the challenge of hurricane evacuation, but have not been fully captured in previous formal evacuation models. The hazard is represented with an ensemble of probabilistic scenarios, population behavior with a dynamic decision model, and traffic with a dynamic user equilibrium model.

Elements of resilience after the World Trade Center disaster: reconstituting New York City's Emergency Operations Centre.

In this paper we examine the reconstitution of the Emergency Operations Centre (EOC) after its destruction in the World Trade Center attack, using that event to highlight several features of resilience. The paper summarises basic EOC functions, and then presents conceptions of resilience as understood from several disciplinary perspectives, noting that work in these fields has sought to understand how a natural or social system that experiences disturbance sustains its functional processes. We observe that, although the physical EOC facility was destroyed, the organisation that had been established to manage crises in New York City continued, enabling a response that drew on the resources of New York City and neighbouring communities, states and the federal government.