All governments have moral and legal responsibility of protection the life and property of its people and preparing for effective protective actions when they suffered natural or man caused disasters. In case of a larger disaster, many rescue personne...
All governments have moral and legal responsibility of protection the life and property of its people and preparing for effective protective actions when they suffered natural or man caused disasters. In case of a larger disaster, many rescue personnel and available equipment are sent into the scene, causing much confusion and complication in the area. To make it worse, however, a non-effective commanding system results in poor performances by such human and material resources and delays in emergency and safety rescue activities other than expected earlier.
Except in training performed in a condition that each of emergency rescue agencies is assigned its duties in detail under a predetermined scenario, many equipment and rescue workers actually mobilized in disaster-stricken areas from different agencies are not effectively instructed, make poor performances, or even become obstacles to disaster control.
Such problems appeared most apparently in the scene of the collapse of the Sampoong Department Store, which happened in June 1995. Despite new legislations on disaster control were enaction reproduced in cases of heavy rain falls of summer season in 1998, receiving severe criticism by the press. This was attributed to an one-the-scene commanding system specified in the existing laws as unreasonable and non-organizational and unavailability of a common telecommunication network together with possible communications between different rescue agencies. Whenever people ask for responsibilities and actions for any incident, authorities concerned simply attempt to solve problems in a way that they merely enact laws and establish institutions. However, the essential problem is that a poorly established commanding system causes control of disastrous areas to be ineffective and wasteful.
Thus it is urgently needed to establish a commanding system with which human and material resources mobilized could be utilized most effectively and secure a new telecommunication network operating the system smoothly. In chapter Ⅱ, we define disaster, emergency rescue and scene commanding and review the existing scene commanding system of Korea and most effective system, developed in the United States that experienced much confusion at disaster areas in the past but is now known as managing disasters most effectively. Chapter Ⅲ discusses the collapse of the Sampoong Department Store with record high of victims in Korean history, and problems with the horrible accident controls. Similarly, the collapse of a federal building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma by a bombing is also discussed. In Chapter Ⅳ, we find out problems with a commanding system for disaster scenes still remaining even after institutional improvements since the department store´s collapse. In chapter Ⅴ, a new system dealing with rescue personnel and equipment effectively in disastrous areas is proposed. And the concept of a trunked radio system and a disaster information network are discussed. Then we review telecommunication network operations by disaster control agencies at the time of disaster and non-disaster. Finally, we provide methods of establishing rights to order by an incident commander for settling and properly functioning the new system, and ways of practically training personnel from agencies concerned.