SGER: Study of Warning and Response to Tornadoes

University Of Delaware, Newark DE

Investigators

Abstract

The Disaster Research Center will carry out a quick-response field reconnaissance trip for a preliminary study of the emergency response to the May 5, 2003 series of tornadoes in Missouri and Oklahoma. The focus of the study will be the warning, system, the response of the emergency management and hospital systems to the storms, and the effects of Project Impact on the ability of cities to mitigate the effects of the storms. Ethnographic observation and informal interviews with key personnel in the hospitals, the city administrators involved with the mitigation, and the emergency management communities (police, fire, emergency management agency), as well as the collection of documents and local mass media accounts of the disasters will be used to examine the functioning of the hospital's emergency operations plan, its institutionalization and emergent response patterns and community mitigation features that were instituted as a result of Project Impact and their effectiveness. Research such as this is important to capture valuable perishable data, especially from an area for which historical disaster data exists, because it can be used to evaluate previous findings on warning systems, hospitals, the responses of the emergency management communities, and the effectiveness of FEMA's Project Impact. The impacts to society are broad in so far as they might serve to improve our operations and procedures for dealing with disasters.