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Occurrences Of Natural Disaster Or Man-Made Disaster

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Final literature review

Introduction

Occurrences of natural disaster or man-made disaster have increased this last decade thus there is a constant need to provide humanitarian support to population affected by such disasters. Means of communications are vital to manage rescues operation during down time. However, in worst case scenario most of the infrastructures are getting damaged. Therefore, it is essential to restore communications within the disaster zone. This literature review is divided in three main stages, which are the consequences of a natural disaster, the need of communication and the solutions available to provide communication to the population.

Disaster consequences

The Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED, 2009) defines a disaster as an unforeseen event that causes destruction and resulted in a high number of civilian casualties, that overwhelms local capacity and request international assistance. Alexander (2014) agrees “An emergency is defined as an exceptional event that exceeds the capacity of normal resources and organization to cope with it”.
Impacts of disaster are usually measured by the cost of direct and indirect losses. What is meant by Indirect losses are losses of employment, temporary unemployed resulting from business disruption caused by building collapsing (National Research Council U.S, 1989) thus the impact can last for an indeterminate period of time (Alexander, 2014b) therefore the cost of Indirect losses caused by natural disasters are difficult to quantified. Whereas direct losses encompass physical destruction, casualties, communication loss, transportation, and emergency response. (National Research Council U.S, 1999). Munich Re (1989, cited in Hoeppe, 2016) states that cost of losses caused by natural disaster have extremely increased since 1950 mainly because of population growth and the complexity of infrastructures in modern societies.
The professor Rahman defines the complex relationship between infrastructures as infrastructures interdependencies where each node is known as a Critical Infrastructures. According to Moteff and Parfomak (2004) a CI is a system that if disrupted can lead to serious issues on the wellbeing of society.

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