Charandry Addition

The Budget

Regarding the weaknesses that were exposed by the previous earthquake disaster in the Organization, there was need for formulation of policy procedures and an emergency budget for constant replacement of the supplies and necessary equipment. The total number of required staff members to operate the department is 500,000 in case of emergencies and they come from different departmental units like fire-fighting, flood prevention, injury medics, rescue team, therapy and search party (Avvenuti, 2014).

The population size being served by the organization is 130 million of which a 27% of the majority citizens stay in the Greater parts of the densely populated Tokyo county that has an approximate of 15 million people inhabiting the region with an average population density being 350 people per kilometer. However, the higher densely populated regions are around the main city agglomerations with a population of about 14,000 people per kilometer square while the lowest populated region is the inland region on the northern side of Osaka County. Most of the people are habited on the coastal region with the exception of the Honshu plain which is on the outskirts of Tokyo (Mohammadi, 2016).

The county of Tokyo is prone to earthquakes due to its dangerous location of intersecting at least four tectonic plates. Therefore, the most affected part is the coastal region while the shallow inland region is less affected. The earthquake led to a total of 100,000 casualties and the buildings destroyed were approximately 390,000 (Holzer & Savage, 2013).

Various emergency supplies to be used in the event of an earthquake

The emergency supplies include; a First Aid Kit to be used in storage of all the supplies and even prevention from water, several drugs like antibiotics and pain killers, different dressing, first aid book, thermometer, soap, scissors, tissues, plastic bags, safety pins, sanitary towels, thread and needle, sunscreen and paper cups (McEntire, 2014).

Earthquake Policy

According to Mohammadi, (2016) the countermeasures for disaster act, the state thereof is fully responsible for coming up with and implementing a plan for earthquake prevention, responsiveness and recovery. Following the alarming large number of road casualties there were policies made by the organization chaired by the minister of interior affairs and other minister to curb and reduce the death toll through introduction of a 30% reduction target in these numbers. A policy commitment to prevention of road accidents and traffic injuries was announced and several other meetings were held prior to the formulation and implementation of this policy. The plans covered engineering of traffic, emergency services and information systems. This development of the road accidents prevention policy was carried down by other multi sectorial agencies though the key issues that were identified included poor individual engagement, lack of the specified resources, performance measures and coordination (Mohammadi, 2016).

Emergency Procedures Need To Be Followed.

Ultimately, the citizens were taught what measures to take during earthquake drills which could be in form of noise, loud bangs, crashes or rumble sounds and alarm bells ringing. There were relevant safety measures laid down and in case of first sight of an earthquake. The recommended drill procedures included; “Dropping to the ground, taking cover under any object especially furniture and kneeling or bending head close to the knees, holding on a table or an object several inches close to the ground to prevent pinching fingers and also covering one’s eyes with the hands and in case the sheltering object moves, one should move with it, one should not shelter near a wall but under it, facing away from windows and remaining in one place until the earthquake shaking stops since it lasts for around 60 seconds. In case of outdoor earthquake scenarios, they should move to an open space very far from buildings, trees, equipment used for playing and fences. If in a vehicle; the driver should stop the vehicle to avoid power lines and bridges (Johnson & Nakayachi, 2017).

Training for employees

All employees in the organization should be trained to employ the drop, cover and hold-on a safe place, look out for fires, use the stairs when leaving the building, move away from buildings, discussion on the topic of earthquake, take a first-aid lesson and the organization should protect the employees by using the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Avvenuti, 2014).

How the public should be trained and educated on earthquake preparedness

The people ought to know how to face the earthquake and the organization should accomplish this through prioritizing in teaching first aid lessons on media which includes television and radio, hosting public meetings on earthquakes and the effects or how to prepare for them, there should be community encouragement, household survival techniques and using earthquake warning systems (Holzer & Savage, 2013).

A plan for maintaining the emergency preparedness budget

Since the earthquake, it was passed on that every citizen should have a disaster supplies kit that would be able to sustain them for three days, a list of the items needed was supposed to be made and sales to be searched, foods rich in proteins, vitamins and minerals were to be packed along with vegetables, fruits and the DIY meals were to be created and canned. Additional water supplies were to be provided in case of earthquakes, every person was to be involved in the process of preparedness and purchasing decisions like buying first aid kits, family hardcopy assets were to be maintained, alternative heating and lighting sources were to be purchased, special care for pets was to be provided through certain pet meals (McEntire, 2014).

Identifying Challenges

During planning for emergency earthquake preparedness, the organization faces challenges during the implementation and maintenance of operations process due to limited resources which is a common problem because most of the organizations like the health department requires resources and therefore they end up being consumed very quickly leading to a disaster. There is also a very low population density in certain areas in the remote therefore a problem comes in during the distribution of resources and most of them are allocated to the areas which are densely populated. In rural areas, there are challenges due to communication issues whereby not all the people are able to get the message especially regarding evacuation or warnings due to higher earthquake drills and there is also an issue of remoteness whereby the organization is not able to reach there due to lack of transport and therefore victims end up suffering when the earthquake hits due to lack of getting the warnings on climate change. There is also lack of enough financial support whereby the organization does not have enough funds to cater for the implementation process of the project. There was also a challenge in the sector related to public housing whereby the committee members argued that there were no enough houses to host victims of displacement during the earthquake (Mohammadi, 2016).

References

Mohammadi, R., Ghomi, S. F., & Jolai, F. (2016). Prepositioning emergency earthquake response supplies: A new multi-objective particle swarm optimization algorithm. Applied Mathematical Modelling, 40(9-10), 5183-5199.

McEntire, D. A. (2014). Disaster response and recovery: strategies and tactics for resilience. John Wiley & Sons.

Holzer, T. L., & Savage, J. C. (2013). Global earthquake fatalities and population. Earthquake Spectra, 29(1), 155-175.

Johnson, B. B., & Nakayachi, K. (2017). Examining associations between citizens' beliefs and attitudes about uncertainty and their earthquake risk judgments, preparedness intentions, and mitigation policy support in Japan and the United States. International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, 22, 37-45.

Avvenuti, M., Cresci, S., Marchetti, A., Meletti, C., & Tesconi, M. (2014, August). EARS (earthquake alert and report system): a real time decision support system for earthquake crisis management. In Proceedings of the 20th ACM SIGKDD international conference on knowledge discovery and data mining (pp. 1749-1758).