Disaster and emergency management activities in Turkey
Sahin, Muhammed, Himmet Karaman and Turan Erden
After the two devastating earthquakes in the Marmara Region of Turkey in August and September of 1999, several disaster and emergency management agencies have been established and several activities have been carried out. This paper summarizes those activities in Turkey. Management of disasters or emergency situations is to conduct preparedness, mitigation, response and recovery activities in a cycle to save life first and then save property. All the stages of this cycle give outputs according to the inputs entered. The quality and the effectiveness of the output acquired from the cycle depend on the quality and detail of the input given to system. In Turkey, very few studies on data collection have been accomplished. For this reason the input data count and the quality are not enough to get the desired output information from disaster and emergency management cycles. Another issue on this is the disconnected studies for these kinds of activities. For example, in Istanbul many studies have been initiated on disaster management. However, the completed ones are not able to work together or use each others data. This inharmoniousness also affects those systems and the decision makers who use those systems. Istanbul has many institutions and agencies for disaster management. Those centers work separate from each other. This causes the creation of the non-unique systems works without coordination. Without managing the data in coordination, there is no easy way to get useful information from that data.
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