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Do Faster Rescues Save More Lives
Author(s) -
Quon Tony K.,
Laube Jan A.
Publication year - 1991
Publication title -
risk analysis
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.972
H-Index - 130
eISSN - 1539-6924
pISSN - 0272-4332
DOI - 10.1111/j.1539-6924.1991.tb00605.x
Subject(s) - operations research , emergency response , incidence (geometry) , perspective (graphical) , case fatality rate , computer science , statistics , operations management , computer security , engineering , transport engineering , demography , mathematics , medical emergency , medicine , artificial intelligence , population , geometry , sociology
The primary mission of search and rescue (SAR) is the saving of lives. To assess SAR operations from a planning perspective, one must draw a connection between operations and the number of lives saved. Our approach is to model the probability that an incident results in at least one fatality, given the response time between the time of incident occurrence and time of rescue. We show that incidents involving air crashes, capsizing, foundering, grounding and other/unknown types of incidents tended to have higher probabilities of fatalities as the response time became higher. However, other emergency types did not exhibit the same overall tendency as these did. These statistical results do not prove causality between faster response times and lower fatality incidence for the above‐mentioned emergency types. They can be used, however, for estimating the average number of fatalities for a given distribution of response time, and ultimately the marginal savings in lives for a change in the mix of resources and locations.