Building assessment during disaster response and recovery

During disaster response and recovery operations,civil engineers can be assigned a multitude of tasksincluding triage of building search priorities, identifi cationand evaluation of structural hazards, as well as thedevelopment of appropriate structural hazard mitigationtechniques and monitoring of hazards, while coordinatingand reporting this information to the incident commandcentre (ICC). This paper reviews the role of civilengineers in disaster response with a focus on existingbuilding assessment and marking systems and highlightsvarious limitations of existing approaches. A mobileinformation technology (IT)-based collaborativeframework is discussed to facilitate a coordinateddisaster response and recovery operation. It enablesengineers to assess building damage better and to makethis information available to personnel more quickly andeasily within the disaster area and thereby improvedisaster response. The deployed architecture is composedof various components including radio frequencyidentifi cation (RFID)-based structural assessment, a fieldengineer’s mobility and information support platformand geographic information systems (GIS)-basedresource optimisation. Deployed infrastructure enablesthe on-site and on-demand information provisioning,data processing and computational support required byengineers in the aftermath of a disaster