Building assessment during disaster response and recovery

During disaster response and recovery operations, civil engineers can be assigned a multitude of tasks including triage of building search priorities, identification and evaluation of structural hazards, as well as the development of appropriate structural hazard mitigation techniques and monitoring of hazards, while coordinating and reporting this information to the incident command centre (ICC). This paper reviews the role of civil engineers in disaster response with a focus on existing building assessment and marking systems and highlights various limitations of existing approaches. A mobile information technology (IT)-based collaborative framework is discussed to facilitate a coordinated disaster response and recovery operation. It enables engineers to assess building damage better and to make this information available to personnel more quickly and easily within the disaster area and thereby improve disaster response. The deployed architecture is composed of various components including radio frequency identification (RFID)-based structural assessment, a field engineer’s mobility and information support platform and geographic information systems (GIS)-based resource optimisation. Deployed infrastructure enables the on-site and on-demand information provisioning, data processing and computational support required by engineers in the aftermath of a disaster.