The wireless ad hoc network is expected to be used as an alternative of the existing mobile communication network to make users communicate securely in a so-called emergency when a large-scale disaster occurs. In this paper, we propose a Real City model which is more practical as a user terminal movement model in the emergency case. Then we analyze the performance of wireless ad hoc networks in the Real City model by using the network simulator. From the simulation results, it is clarified that changing the routing protocol attribute value and increasing the number of mobile terminals that contributes to the communication route formation are necessary to improve the ad hoc network performance.

As of December 2008, four years passed after the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami and lots of urban infrastructure related to the recovery projects had been constructed in the most damaged area, Aceh, Indonesia. It is significant for other big cities to monitor the recovery process of the stricken area in Aceh to make counterplans and recovery plans to prepare great disasters in the feature. The authors analyzed recovery process of buildings and urban infrastructure in Indonesia using recovery curves and the policy of reconstruction. In this paper the difference between the actual process of reconstruction and prepared rehabilitation plan of the recovery projects are clarified.

It is important to construct distributed self-sustaining architectures or districts for preparing lifeline disruption caused by earthquake. In this study, public buildings and places, i.e. municipal government offices, hospitals, schools, or public halls, are selected as candidate for distributed self-sustaining architecture in national capital region, Japan. We researched and spatial analyzed the existing public facilities and places in 1709 areas, the entire area of Yokohama City is divided into. Futhermore, we classified the areas into some categories. As a result, the method of urban clustering with energy demand property as an index was proposed for constructing and maintaining distributed self-sustaining zone for earthquake disaster reduction in urban area.

Disaster reconstruction should be implemented on the basis of local characteristics as well as lessons from the past. It is quite important to promote both decentralization of power and public-private cooperation. This study analyzes the characteristics of Disaster Reconstruction Fund and Intermediary Organization through both cases in the HanshinAwaji and Chuetsu Earthquakes. It is found that the fund is an useful tool to activate intermediary organization for leading local initiative. And this study also considers the challenge and vision of the Fund to make it more reliable for local governments.

Once disaster occurs, victims whose house has broken would move in temporary housings built by local government. There is no standardized indicator to build and manage the temporary housings in affected government. In this research, we reveal the situation of the geographical moving process from the time phase of disaster occurrence to the time phase of move-in, and analyzed this process quantitatively and qualitatively with the attribute of households in each temporary housing at 2007 Niigataken Chuetsu-oki earthquake. The result of this analysis will be helpful to design the critical model for the victims’ moving process, and discussed the guideline for design and construction of temporary housings from the view point of long-term life recovery support.

The Tokai, Tonankai, and Nankai earthquakes have the possibility to rupture, respectively, at certain time intervals. This paper discusses the economic loss issues caused by the time lag occurring. Firstly the specific characteristics of the issues are shown. Secondly, a case of the long term disaster is examined. And then economic scales in the estimated damage area are evaluated. Based on these results, the indirect economic losses in the case that the Nankai earthquake occurs after a long interval from the Tokai-Tonankai earthquake occurring are calculated. The results indicated that the economic scales in the estimated damage area are very large, and indirect economic damages for the long term disaster threat may be extremely high.

Anticipated scenarios of restoration process associated with critical infrastructures such as electric power supply systems, gas supply systems, water treatments, and communication networks due to a seismic disaster are quantitavely modeled. Current operational plans for disaster prevention offered by stakeholders associated with subject critical infrastructures distributed in the Tokyo metropolitan area, are analyzed based on the graph theory. The related interdependency is modeled and analyzed by selecting the dominant events in the restoration process and by idealizing them as a directed graph.

This paper proposes a framework of Disaster Management for high seismic decades in Japan. The initial aims of Disaster Countermeasures Basic Act, which was established in 1961 based on lessons from Ise-Bay Typhoon disaster of 1959, were 1) comprehensive disaster management, 2) planning for disaster management, and 3) organizational structure for mega-scale disaster. However, those objectives have not completely realized within the act. Guiding principles for disaster management such as 1) comprehensiveness, 2) strategic planning, 3) organizational structure, and 4) coordination with future vision are clarified through comparison with U.S. disaster management framework. Based on those guiding principle, Japanese disaster management activities were reviewed.

Once disaster occurs, local governments have to provide many kinds of relief programs to victims. Kashiwazaki city realized rational and effective support for victims’ life recovery process based on Victims Master Database at 2007 Niigataken Chuetsu-oki earthquake. However they struggled with the difficulty of fair victims certification without standardized method. Against this issue, we cleared up the problems at disaster response based on two types of interviews: one is individual interviews to responders who had main responsibility to support for victims’ life recovery at 2004 Niigataken Chuetsu earthquake, 2007 Noto Hanto earthquake and 2007 Niigataken Chuetsu-oki earthquake, the other is a joint interview to these three responders to share the experience each other. Based on these interviews, we proposed the effective method for victims’ certification process in this paper.

This paper demonstrated the use of disaster ethnographies as a tool to help inexperienced emergency responders to re-experience step-by-step processes associated with real-life flood disaster responses. 48 fire department fresh recruits were assigned to read and analyze disaster ethnographies of 3 local volunteer firefighters who responded to the 2004 Typhoon 23 flooding disasters. A following brainstorming session facilitated them in formalizing effective flooding disaster responses when working together with local volunteer firefighters. Post-session questionnaire survey supported that the brainstorming session helped the learners to re-create images of actual flooding situations and to understand corresponding effective response/preparedness activities with local volunteer firefighters.

In this paper, the necessity of Business Continuity Plan (BCP) in local government is presented and the methodology of BCP planning is developed through the surveys of both the business continuities in affected local governments in Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake in 1995 and Mid-Niigata Earthquake in 2004 and the actual business system in local government located in suburban Tokyo. It is very important to develop the BCP of each local government by themselves, because the many important issues for business continuity after the disaster are found in this planning process. It is more important for the effective risk management to invite the BCP as PDCA cycle in every day after development of the BCP of first version.