This paper examines the different types of conditions encountered on international search and rescue activities, and how these affect the rescue teams' ability to rescue people alive. This includes, for example, requests from the affected country, the type of disaster and type of building materials and debris involved in the event. This paper also explores the positive effects that these teams can generate. Although it can be difficult to rescue people alive, the role of international search and rescue teams is not limited only to saving lives. Through these observations, this paper will provide some suggestions to improve future deployment and reception of international search and rescue teams.

Sufficient supports and countermeasures from central and local governments in rural mountainous areas cannot be expected although a vulnerability to disasters at such areas has been increasing especially in developing countries including Thailand. On the other hand, the use of mobile phone has been growing more popular in such areas. This research conducted two surveys in remote mountainous areas to examine the possibility of introduction of Short Message Service (SMS) of mobile phone as a disaster information dissemination mean using Loei Province, northeastern Thailand, as a study area. Trough the surveys, recommended way of its introduction was found for improving present dissemination systems.

The policies of urban fire prevention in Edo almost reached fruition by the Kyoho period. The three main fire prevention policies were: 1) setting up fire-safety vacant lots, 2) organization of fire company, and 3) architectural regulation for fire prevention. These three fire prevention policies feature their mutual linkage in their implementation. However, the number of fire-safety vacant lots gradually decreased after the Kyoho period, the architectural regulation for fire prevention was eased, regarding the fire-fighting organization, organizations on the side of samurai families diminished little by little, and the linkage between three policies weakened. At the end of Edo Period, Machibikeshi (town fire fighters) came to be in charge of fire prevention in Edo thoroughly.

The operation and management of an shelter in a disaster requires better coordination among disabled people and other parties such as local communities, professional experts and public administrations. In view of such idea, a training program was implemented aiming at developing imagination skills in a disaster. The training brought about many effects as follows: 1)Raised awareness of disabled persons for social integration through taking roles of actors of various types such as participants and lecturers, 2)Developed skills of local communities in communication with disabled persons, 3)Encouraged participation of disabled persons particularly of a group having less social connections, 4)Clarified sharing of responsibilities of each stakeholders, 5)Encouraged proposals on universal designing for disaster shelters utilizing personal experiences of disaster affected disabled people, and 6) Provided disabled people of various types with opportunities of exchanging information and participating in social debates.

This research described the plants installation possibility of distributed self-reliance energy-mainly about Cogeneration system (CGS), selecting Tokyo as research area. In this study, firstly we selected facilities installed CGS which need the most power in dealing with immediately after disaster, like as Government Administration Office, Medical Facilities and Welfare. Then according to the survey on energy supply equipment and electricity demand of building, we determined the capacity of CGS and calculated the exhaust heat from CGS. The main point of this research is not only strengthening the electricity supply of their own line, but delivering the exhaust heat to surround buildings which are over 3,000 square meters for effective using. The maximum generation capacity that can be deployed to 2 facilities is 177.08 MW, without reaching the goal of 500 MW. And maximum rate of energy saving of CGS is 0.45%, CO₂ emission reduction rate is 0.38%.

The Great East Japan Earthquake has taught us the importance of improving power to receive outside support in addition to improving power to provide support to make efficient use of inter-local-government-assistance. This research has two steps: 1) developing scales measuring assessment of inter-local-government-assistance, power to receive outside support and power to provide support 2) building the general linear model of inter-local-governmentassistance scale determined on power to receive outside support and power to provide support based on Kobe City Assistance.

In this study, the authors extracted papers and reports on disaster prevention from an academic societies' proceedings and analyzed the trend of disaster prevention research fields automatically from preset standpoints. Specifically, a database of research papers related to disaster prevention was built, and analysis standpoints such as "type of disaster," "type of countermeasures," and "type of disaster effects" were set. Keywords related to these standpoints were collected, and research papers on disaster prevention were extracted from the database using fulltext search. Furthermore, the "hitting rate" was calculated based on the distribution of keywords within the full-text search, which made it possible to analyze the trend of each academic society.

This paper aims at clarifying the manner of injured transportation between hospitals after a big earthquake. The documents to which injured transportation between hospitals after the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake was written were classified and the hospital distribution situation and transportation procedure were analyzed. As a result, the role of the hospital inside and outside of the dameged area is classified into three ;S-Hospitals which applied the injured inside the damage area, G-Hospitals which applied the transported injured from the damage hospitals, and SG Hospitals which applied the both. It is supported the present disaster core hospitals were appropriate. It is necessary to build up a closer connection with the disaster core hospitals to transport injured after a big earthquake.

Seismic intensity is well-known index of strong ground motion to measure earthquake damage. Since it was revised as the instrumental seismic intensity, it is pointed that it does not meet well with earthquake damage during the earthquakes following the 1995 Kobe earthquake. A new seismic intensity considering the ground motion of 1s in period was proposed based on past earthquake records. This study attempts to verify the applicability of the new seismic intensity for the giant inter-plate earthquake such as the 2011 off the Pacific coast of Tohoku earthquake. The new seismic intensity has good correlation with building damage and is applicable to the ground motion of the interplate earthquake having the far source and long duration.

It is important to manage a system for human resource support from outside of affected areas for disaster response. In this paper, we have basically evaluated and analyzed the data of external human resource support into Iwate, Miyagi and Fukushima in the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake disaster. The number of assisting staffs from outside affected area, volunteers and temporary inflowing population as the index of human resource support at each city and town have been evaluated with available parameters. The results suggest that the correlation of the number of external human resource with the hazard impact is low but those with human damage, physical damage, population before the quake, and exposure of mass media is significant.