Social networks perspective of firefighters' adaptive behaviour and coordination among them

Preparing for emergencies and their management is considered to be dynamic and challenging in controlling crises, preventing losses, and in the allocation of resources. In this study, we argue that improving plans and operations of personnel involved in managing fire-related emergencies is an important area of investigation. Here, we investigate the effects of social network relations (i.e., tie strength) among individual participants in different teams to manage bushfires. We further explore response coordination by exploring variables such as preparedness, accessibility of resources, quality of coordination of the Incident Management Team's (IMT's) preparedness, quality of individual's preparedness, and quality of accessibility of resources. Furthermore, we also test the effects of coordination on adaptive behaviour during emergency events to see if there is an association with better performance. Our results show high positive correlation between social network measures e.g., individual and teams' tie strength) and coordination. We also found significant relationship between coordination and participants' adaptive behaviour. By exploring the proposed model, we are able to develop a better understanding of the coordination and management of individuals, agencies and organizations participating in responding to emergency coordination. © 2010 IEEE.link_to_subscribed_fulltex