Sharing the post-earthquake situation for emergency response management in transborder areas: The e-Atlas tool

Usually,the response after a disastrous event requires decision-makers in emergency operative rooms to quickly outline and understand the current post-event situation,for planning and defining strategies for a contextualized response.Moreover,in many cases,disastrous events affect cross-border territories and/or involve multiple orga-nizations in responding to the demand generated by the event.These cases require a harmonized and coordinated response by all the institutions/subjects involved in emergency management.To address this challenge,this pa-per proposes the e-Atlas(emergency atlas)tool for showing and sharing information that embraces a response management perspective to explicitly support decision-makers in managing the criticalities of a post-earthquake situation.The e-Atlas has been designed and tested to:i)acquire sensible information for allowing decision-makers to understand in almost real-time the post-earthquake situational picture,and ii)share the representation of the situational picture among different users,allowing each of them to use it according to its specific require-ments.Applications of the tool are illustrated,to show how it is used in a transborder context in the North-East area of Italy.

Standardized Management Outlined in Future Response to Emergency Plan

The General Office of the State Council released the 13th Five-Year Plan for China's National Emergency System Construction(Plan for short).According to the Plan,China's emergency management laws and regulations and standards system need to be further improved and the basic capabilities of emergency management should continue to be enhanced.

Development and application of a water pollution emergency response system for the Three Gorges Reservoir in the Yangtze River, China

There are many watercraft and production accidents in the Three Gorges Reservoir Area （TGRA） of the Yangtze River in China every year. Accidents threaten the water quality of the 1085 km 2 surface area of the TGRA and millions of local people if oil and chemical leakage were to occur. A water pollution management system for emergency response （WPMS ER） was therefore designed for the management of pollution in this area. An integrated geographic information system （GIS）-based water pollution management information system for the TGRA, called WPMS ER TGRA, was developed in this study. ArcGIS engine was used as the system development platform, and Visual Basic as the programming language. The models for hydraulic and water quality simulation and the generation of body-fitted coordinates were developed and programmed as a dynamically linked library file using Visual Basic, and they can be launched by other computer programs. Subsequently, the GIS-based information system was applied to the emergency water pollution management of a shipwreck releasing 10 tons of phenol into the Yangtze River during two hours. The results showed that WPMS ER TGRA can assist with emergency water pollution management and simulate the transfer and diffusion of accidental pollutants in the river. Furthermore, it can quickly identify the affected area and how it will change over time within a few minutes of an accident occurring.