This research aims at demonstrating that wayfinding solutions can improve the effectiveness of the evacuation processes in complex architectural spaces such as those of cruise ships. We investigated the behaviours of passengers in maritime disaster to figure out whether people act similarly during buildings egress and ships evacuation. Data were collected through questionnaires administered in 2015 to passengers boarding various cruise ships at the port of Ancona (Italy), and through the analysis of real footage of the evacuation of the Costa Concordia. The open source software Fire Dynamics Simulator with Evacuation (FDS+EVAC), used in building egress analyses, was adapted to include these behavioural and event information such as familiarity with ship layout, ship rotation and lifeboats boarding. Simulation results on the case study confirmed similarities between ships and buildings evacuations, underlining the effectiveness of wayfinding solutions to improve passengers' evacuation flows and routes selection. This study also demonstrated that computer simulation could benefit the ship design process, the preparation of safety guidelines, and the crewmembers during naval emergency management training.

This article explores the impacts of floods on the economy, environment, and society and tries to clarify the rural community's coping mechanism to flood disasters in Central Viet Nam. It focuses on the social aspects of flood risk perception that shapes the responses to floods. The research findings revealed that flooding is an essential element for a coastal population, whose livelihood depend on productive functions of cyclical floods. The findings also revealed that floods, causing losses and damages, often inhibited economic development. The surveyed communities appeared to have evolved coping mechanisms to reduce the negative impacts of the floods, yet these coping mechanisms are under pressure due to environmental degradation. Integrated flood risk management is considered as a suitable paradigm for coping with flood disasters.

No abstract

A comparative survey of a diverse sample of 96 US and Italian emergency management agencies shows that the diffusion of new information technologies (IT) has transformed disaster communications. Although these technologies permit access to and the dissemination of massive amounts of disaster information with unprecedented speed and efficiency, barriers rooted in the various professional cultures still hinder the sharing of disaster knowledge. To be effective the available IT must be attuned to the unique settings and professional cultures of the local emergency management communities. Findings show that available technology, context, professional culture and interaction are key factors that affect the knowledge transfer process. Cultural filters appear to influence emergency managers' perceptions of their own professional roles, their vision of the applicability of technology to social issues, and their perspective on the transferability of disaster knowledge. Four cultural approaches to the application of IT to disaster communications are defined: technocentric; geographic,; anthropocentric; and ecocentric.

On Monday, 6 April 2009 at 3:32 a.m. (local time), a moment magnitude 6.3 earthquake with an epicenter located near the city of L'Aquila, in central Italy, killed 308 people, injured 1,500, left 22,000 homeless, and temporarily displaced another 65,000. This study examines a sample of the affected population and finds that despite the long list of historical earthquakes that struck the region and the swarm of foreshocks occurring up to four months before the main shock of 6 April, the residents of L'Aquila had a rather low earthquake risk perception and an unjustified confidence in the seismic safety of their houses. This low perception of earthquake risk and ignorance of the real structural resistance of buildings appear to have inhibited the individual and collective propensity to develop emergency plans. This situation was further exacerbated by the lack of clear and forthright communication from the emergency management authorities about the impossibility of precisely predicting earthquakes and about the risks posed by many of the city's old buildings.