Open AccessMacro Analysis of Initial Responses from Yabuki Municipal Government After the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake
Author(s) -
Muneyoshi Numada,
Kimiro Meguro
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
journal of disaster research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.332
H-Index - 18
eISSN - 1883-8030
pISSN - 1881-2473
DOI - 10.20965/jdr.2014.p0149
Subject(s) - disaster response , government (linguistics) , sorting , service (business) , business , task (project management) , emergency response , macro level , emergency management , macro , natural disaster , environmental planning , computer security , operations management , engineering , computer science , political science , geography , medical emergency , marketing , economics , law , medicine , economic system , philosophy , linguistics , systems engineering , meteorology , programming language
An effective initial response immediately after disaster strikes is not easy to provide when human and material resources and information are lacking. The purpose of this study is to achieve effective initial response activities immediately after disaster strikes, and it analyzes the initial responses taken by the government of the town of Yabuki, Fukushima Prefecture in the case of the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake. Disaster responses taken in the first five days after the disaster struck Yabuki are discussed in this paper. As a result, we have found that many staff members were deployed to nonregular works, such as food service, water service, and the sorting and transporting of materials, that could have been done even without town government staff members. To effectively deploy about all Yabuki staff members and conduct disaster response activities, it is necessary to classify the difficulty level of tasks, identify what each task entails, and then allocate the necessary resources to those tasks.