Disaster Community Resilience Fast Assessment by Multilevel Distributed Expertise and Smartphone Communication

According to the World Bank the natural hazards, mostly earthquake and storm, have caused 3.3 million deaths between 1970 and 2010 (i.e. about 82.500 a year with large year- to-year fluctuations) and have cost $2,300 billion (in 2008 dollars) between 1970 and 2008. A disaster is defined as: “a potentially traumatic event that is collectively experienced, has an acute onset, and is time delimited; disasters may be attributed to natural, technological, or human causes” (McFarlane & Norris, 2006). The disasters effects depend on the vulnerability of the community to natural and artificial hazards, such as earthquakes, terrorist attacks, hurricanes, etc. Moreover, it has been shown that the communities have no sufficient knowledge about how to manage critical events. Indeed, societies are turning their attention to efforts and ways that can enhance not only the prevention of natural or manmade disasters but also the community resilience – that is the attitude of a community, an urban system, an infrastructure network, etc., to bear threats and solicitations due to physical or functional obsolescence or to heavy risks, by limiting and localizing damages as much as possible, controlling the extension of the effects, avoiding dangerous interaction among system components, allowing a fast recovery and use – against various types of extreme events. The communities are accepting that they cannot prevent every risk, but rather must learn to adapt and handle risks in a faster way that minimizes impact on human and other systems. Moreover, most of the people of developed countries can own cell phones or of smartphones. They use to receive news, interchange data or find out their position in real time (e.g., with GPS or GSM network). Therefore this technology can be used to develop powerful tools to 2 Vincenzo Arcidiacono “Disaster Community Resilience Fast Assessment by Multilevel Distributed Expertise and Smartphone Communication” face up disasters by gathering real time data about them and transferring information such as emergency alerts and post-disaster conditions.