Design of Disaster Crisis Center Function based on Crisis Management

Concept

Aang Gunawan Sutyawan

and Albarda

School of Electrical Engineering and Informatics, Faculty of electrical Engineering, Bandung Institute of Technology,

Bandung, Indonesia

Keywords:

Crisis Center, Crisis Management, Emergency, Disaster.

Abstract:

Crises can be interpreted as a condition/situation that threatens and creates risks so that immediate han-

dling/action needs by means of an emergency to prevent it from deteriorating. A situation can be a crisis

in the event of a natural disaster that has the risk of causing casualties and a broad impact on the community,

afﬂicting government business units, and very large ﬁnancial losses. The way to deal with disasters in the

crisis phase is to create a Crisis Center which is the center of management in managing information and coor-

dinating disaster response centers. In a crisis situation, gathering information, making decisions, and directing

appropriate actions requires good coordination. This research attempts to answer the problems by designing

the functions of a Crisis Center related to crisis situations to support emergency response action plans based

on the concept of crisis management so that decision-makers can determine the most optimal steps.

1 INTRODUCTION

Referring to a study conducted by the National Disas-

ter Management Authority (NDMA), millions of In-

donesians are in the threat of natural disasters. Based

on the data, 86.2 million people were exposed to

the risk of earthquake disasters, 3.7 million people

were prone to tsunamis, and millions of other disas-

ters (Mohd. Robi Amri, 2016). In the last decade,

there have been seven tsunami disasters in Indone-

sia. Mentawai (2010), Papua (2011), Aceh and West

Sumatra (2012), and Southeast Sulawesi, Banten and

Lampung (2018) (Bencana, 2019). The impact of the

tsunami was very large and caused many casualties

and damage. This data illustrates that a tsunami dis-

aster is one of the disasters that pose a serious threat

to the risk of high casualties. The time span between

tsunami early warning and the arrival of a tsunami un-

til the status of a tsunami ends is a phase of crisis that

must be managed optimally in an effort to deal with

disaster emergencies.

A crisis or emergency is a threatening condi-

tion that requires immediate action. Effective emer-

gency action can prevent events from getting worse

(UNISDR, 2009)(Zamoum and Gorpe, 2018)(Al-

Dahash et al., 2016). So the crisis can be interpreted

as a condition/situation that threatens and raises risks

so that it needs immediate handling/action by means

of an emergency so that it does not deteriorate. This

phase begins when a disaster occurs until the end of

the crisis period and the start of the disaster recovery

phase(Khan et al., 2008). This stage greatly deter-

mines the impact of a disaster. If the crisis phase can

be handled properly, it can minimize the loss of life

and material losses due to the disaster. Therefore re-

quires management that can manage a crisis situation

from occurring due to natural disasters.

Crisis management means to deal with situations

in which events that threaten the safety and security of

the public will occur, or to manage it after happened

(Abe et al., 2018). Crisis management is a proactive

process that involves handling crises and speciﬁc ac-

tions taken to solve problems caused by crises (Car-

bery et al., 2014)(Devlin, 2006). So crisis manage-

ment is a planned response to a crisis situation, which

must be carried out effectively and on time when the

crisis occurs. Crisis management also provides criti-

cal information needed for decision makers and plans

that can be used to deal with crisis situations.

A situation is interpreted as a crisis in the event of

a natural disaster which has the risk of causing casual-

ties and widespread impact on the community, afﬂict-

ing government business units at once, and very large

ﬁnancial losses. In this condition, the highest level

of management in the area must lead the implementa-

tion directly. The highest management in question is

Sutyawan, A. and Albarda, .

Design of Disaster Crisis Center Function based on Crisis Management Concept.

DOI: 10.5220/0009858400850090

In Proceedings of the International Conference on Creative Economics, Tourism and Information Management (ICCETIM 2019) - Creativity and Innovation Developments for Global

Competitiveness and Sustainability, pages 85-90

ISBN: 978-989-758-451-0

the district head of the affected area. After the district

head receives news of a disaster emergency, the next

step is to do a brief analysis, whether the emergency

situation has reached a crisis situation. If it reaches a

crisis situation, the district head must announce that

the condition of the area is in a crisis situation. One

of the facilities needed in carrying out crisis manage-

ment is the Command Center (CC).

In general, CC can be interpreted as a lo-

cation/place to provide orders, coordination, and

decision-making in supporting emergency responses.

The aim of CC is to collect and process the infor-

mation needed to be able to manage various events

and situational awareness quickly and effectively. The

command center function is to provide central control

points for the operations of the actors involved during

the crisis so that they can give and obtain, every and

all, available information about the status of the crisis

(Devlin, 2006).

Indonesia, as one of the countries that helped rat-

ify the Framework for Hyogo has also implemented

disaster risk reduction efforts. Thus many govern-

ment departments rely on their own special emer-

gency response systems to conduct rescue operations,

most contingency plans are designed from the per-

spective of their own sector. It is not surprising that

these emergency plans usually have many disadvan-

tages, such as inappropriate human resources alloca-

tion, poor information communication with external

entities, and a narrow range in which resources are

distributed. Once a large scale emergency occurs,

such an emergency plan type cannot provide an ad-

equate response. The way to deal with disasters in the

crisis phase is to create a Crisis Center which is the

center of management in managing information and

coordinating disaster response centers. This research

attempts to answer the problems by designing the

functions of a Crisis Center related to crisis situations

to support emergency response action plans based on

the concept of crisis management, so that decision-

makers can determine the most optimal steps. In a

crisis situation, CC can turn into a crisis center. The

focus of this research is on tsunami natural disasters

with adequate early warning assumptions.

2 LITERATURE REVIEW

2.1 Crisis Management

(Bundy et al., 2017) identiﬁed two main perspectives

that focused on various aspects of crisis and crisis

management.

1. Internal perspective, focusing on organizational

dynamics in managing risk, complexity, and tech-

nology. Crisis management involves the coordi-

nation of complex technical and relational sys-

tems and the design of organizational structures to

prevent the occurrence, reduce impacts, and learn

from crises.

2. External perspectives, focusing on the interaction

of organizations and external stakeholders, mostly

come from the theory of social perception and im-

pression management. According to this perspec-

tive, crisis management involves the formation of

perceptions and coordination with stakeholders to

prevent, resolve, and develop a crisis. From this

literature review, the internal perspective focuses

on crisis leadership, while the external perspective

focuses on stakeholder perceptions.

(Blyth, 2009) illustrate the focus areas involved in

crisis events as follows: incident and crisis manage-

ment teams, crisis control centers, evacuation coordi-

nation centers, emergency response teams, corporate

front teams, incident management plans, and other

crisis response plans. During emergency response op-

erations, information management becomes very im-

portant. Emergency management stakeholders - as

decision makers - require ongoing access to a vari-

ety of distributed data sources to plan, make the right

decisions, and allocate resources for certain tasks.

2.2 Emergency Operation Center

(EOC)

The Japanese government made its crisis management

system model follow the Incident Command System

(ICS) in Europe and the US disaster crisis manage-

ment, seen from administrations that have important

factors, namely: (1) organization, (2) information, (3)

evacuation, (4) coordination, (5) reduction of inci-

dents, and (6) reconstruction. Especially about disas-

ter information includes what has happened and disas-

ter management what must be done to reduce damage

(Abe et al., 2018).

(Dave, 2015) put forward the deﬁnition of an

emergency operations center is a physical facility

equipped with technical infrastructure where decision

makers meet to coordinate disaster emergency mea-

sures. Seven important functions (there may be more

or less based on the disaster management agenda) oc-

cur in the EOC before, during, and after a disaster: co-

ordination, policy making, operations management,

information management, documentation, public in-

formation, and simulation. During emergency re-

sponse operations, information management becomes

ICCETIM 2019 - International Conference on Creative Economics, Tourism Information Management

very important. Emergency management stakehold-

ers - as decision makers - require access to a variety

of distributed data sources to plan, make the right de-

cisions, and allocate resources for certain tasks (Asi-

makopoulou and Bessis, 2011)(Perry, 1995).

3 RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

3.1 Crisis Information and Response

Timeline

Information Tsunami disaster begins with tsunami

early warning issued by Meteorological, Climatolog-

ical, and Geophysical Agency (BMKG) as the autho-

rized institution. This institution delivers earthquake

information, tsunami early warning information, and

suggestions for follow-up in tsunami-threatened areas

to other parties in the tsunami early warning commu-

nication chain. After receiving an emergency tsunami

warning message, the next step is for regional heads

to announce that in a crisis situation, and at this time

is the beginning of the crisis phase. At this stage, the

crisis center gives the command to disaster manage-

ment units regarding steps that must be taken in order

to deal with the disaster crisis. In the event of a dis-

aster, the command is integrated at the crisis center.

Figure 1 shows the time period of the tsunami disas-

ter.

Figure 1: Estimated local tsunami time span (BMKG, 2012)

BMKG publishes news tsunami early warning

within 5 minutes after the earthquake occurred, fol-

lowed by a couple of times news updates news and

ending the threat of a tsunami has ended. Tsunami

early warning message contains the tsunami threat

level for the district with the status of ’Awas’, ’Siaga’

and ’Waspada’.

3.2 Analysis Concept of the Crisis

Center Functions

In disaster management, the readiness phase and re-

sponse phase are part of the disaster management ef-

fort that is nuanced by emergency and often emotional

nuances so that the crisis management function plays

an important role. The proposed concept is a combi-

nation of characteristics of the functions of the EOC

and crisis management. In chapter 2, a number of

crisis center function concepts have been deﬁned and

identiﬁed in previous studies. Based on the existing

concept, analysis of key functions is carried out, and

then reformulated into a new concept. The process of

forming the crisis center function concept can be seen

in Figure 2.

Figure 2: Concept of crisis center function

3.2.1 Organizational Structure

Design of the organizational structure of crisis center

is divided into two stages, namely the stage of analy-

sis and process.

a. Needs analysis design of organizational structure

The selection of organizational structure is in-

tended so that the organization tasked with man-

aging the crisis and disaster emergency response

has a concise but reliable. It is necessary to ensure

that the crisis center head is in charge of the im-

plementation operational and disaster emergency

response management, and does not have the au-

thority to determine the emergency status of the

disaster which is the authority of the highest lead-

ership of the regional government, namely the dis-

trict head.

b. Organizational Structure Design Process

In the following organizational structure design,

the crisis center head is the command center and

operations leader to provide more ﬂexibility in

terms of coordination. more details can be seen

in the Figure 3

3.2.2 Physical Facilities

The crisis center is a physical location complete with

the necessary infrastructure, where a leader together

with a team conducts a meeting, makes a decision,

assigns, coordinates, monitors and controls all actions

needed in response to the crisis. These actions include

Design of Disaster Crisis Center Function based on Crisis Management Concept

Figure 3: Crisis center organizational structure

emergency response actions, recovery and recovery

plans, and steps to provide public information. In de-

veloping a crisis center, it needs to be considered: lo-

cation, building and supporting facilities.

The chosen location must have natural disaster

risks and security threats in low-level. Crisis cen-

ter construction speciﬁcations issued under the dis-

aster risk management program (DRM) recommend

that crisis center spaces should be designed with rein-

forced concrete frames, for twice the seismic strength

normally designed by residential buildings in each

zone so that the crisis center building will have fac-

tors that much higher than security against possible

earthquakes.

Space layout should allow the team to meet, com-

municate, work, and stay in the place within a few

days. Communication systems, IT systems, power

systems, security systems, complete with emergency

support facilities are imperative in supporting facili-

ties. Figure 4 contains features of supporting facilities

from the crisis center.

Figure 4: Features of supporting facilities

3.2.3 Decision Makers

Decisions and procedures are developed at the cri-

sis center to anticipate disaster risk. A comprehen-

sive emergency plan must determine decisions to re-

spond to certain disaster events. However, most de-

cisions can be generated by situational demands (eg

the amount, time or speciﬁc impact of the threat) and

consequently not included in the existing plan. Such

decisions usually represent managerial decisions and

strategies taken by the crisis center leadership and

then disseminated. Important points that must be con-

sidered when formulating a decision include: Identi-

ﬁcation of events; Identiﬁcation of personnel led with

overall responsibility; identiﬁcation of key stakehold-

ers; standard operating procedures for operating func-

tions; emergency resource management system; exist-

ing infrastructure (Dave, 2015)(Perry, 1995).

3.2.4 Coordination Center

Crisis centers serve as coordination points for emer-

gency activities that provide centralized meetings,

planning, and reporting facilities. Coordination in-

volves assessing the nature of the threat of a disaster

and compiling the organizational resources available

to act together with each other against the threat. Con-

sequently, the crisis center is responsible for ensuring

that the respondent organizations work together and

know each other’s mission, responsibilities, and ar-

eas of operation. The crisis center leadership uses a

comprehensive emergency plan as a framework for

achieving coordination. In this plan a cooperation

agreement is made, assignment of tasks assigned to

different organizations, the chain of command and

enumeration of available resources. Coordination is

therefore facilitated and established before a disas-

ter occurs, and is codiﬁed in the plan. In this de-

sign, the crisis center leadership must creatively and

spontaneously overcome the problems of implemen-

tation and mobilization at that time, but the coordi-

nation base is established in the planning process and

strengthened through experience with disaster train-

ing or simulation.

Figure 5: Crisis Center as a Coordination Center

3.3 Information Center

Information ﬂows to the crisis center during a disas-

ter. Data on the implementation of disaster response,

ICCETIM 2019 - International Conference on Creative Economics, Tourism Information Management

damage assessment, and recovery operations must be

collected, analyzed, and distributed to the appropriate

parties so that they can be followed up in an effec-

tive and timely manner. Information needs related to

the impact of disasters, combined, form a crisis center

function as an information center. Beyond the dam-

age assessment, the crisis center requires information

about the successful implementation of the overall

disaster response. This includes information about the

timing and effectiveness of operational decisions. The

crisis center is also a clearinghouse for information;

collect information about the activities and successes

of various respondent institutions and submit this in-

formation to other respondent institutions with related

tasks.

3.3.1 Documentation Center

Information collected on crisis center during a disas-

ter is becoming critical in decision making, both dur-

ing and after the emergency. In addition, the docu-

mentation of the emergency response during a disas-

ter event allows for the evaluation in the future about

what works and what doesn’t work. This information

is often used to deﬁne ”lessons learned, ” which can

help the development of policies and procedures in

the future.

3.3.2 Public Communication Centre

The crisis center is responsible for disseminating in-

formation to the public, at-risk communities, and the

media. This will reduce the difﬁculties associated

with incorrect information and ambiguity because the

main source of response data is accurate, that is, from

the crisis center. With regard to public information

needs, two hearings are a major concern: the gen-

eral public and the community are at risk in the dis-

aster faced. Other important audiences who some-

times function as a buffer between the crisis center

and other publics are mass media. Historically, it was

also known that mass media would disseminate their

own information if disaster managers failed to work

together and provide information.

Thus, effective disaster management actually re-

quires some consideration from the mass media. Es-

tablishing a function of disseminating information

connected with crisis centers can resolve various dif-

ﬁculties that usually arise in disaster management. It

is very important that the respondent organization in

the ﬁeld not be a source of independent contact with

the media. By concentrating this function in a cri-

sis center, and placing it under the supervision of a

public information ofﬁcer, someone ensures that con-

sistent and accurate messages are disseminated, and

at the same time facilitates the media to obtain au-

thorized information. The dissemination of accurate

information to the wider community can also reduce

the demands of the emergency response system by:

• ensure that outsiders know where the affected area

is and how to avoid it, thereby reducing problems

associated with convergence;

• ensure that outsiders know where affected friends

and relatives are, reduce the need for information

to call, visit or ”save” these people.

Furthermore, Figure 5 shows the functions of in-

formation management and operations management

in the crisis center.

Figure 6: The function of information management and op-

erations management in the crisis center

4 CONCLUSIONS

In this study, the design of the structure and func-

tion of the crisis center has been described. The crisis

center description or model presented here is taken

from the research literature review and related re-

search data. This model can serve regional heads in

at least three main ways. First, it provides a basis for

comparison by offering standard structures and func-

tions that can be compared with existing emergency

response centers. Such comparisons are useful be-

cause they encourage oversight of the government’s

response system, the community, and it’s needed.

Second, this model can serve as a guide for the gov-

ernment in building a crisis center. This design pro-

vides structures and functions that might be included

in the design of the new crisis center. Third, the model

presented here can be the basis for discussion of how

the crisis center can be designed with the concept of

disaster crisis management. For further research on

the function of disaster crisis centers can be done in

two focuses. The ﬁrst is how to implement the con-

cept of the function that has been designed. The sec-

ond is evaluating the concept of crisis management

implemented.

Design of Disaster Crisis Center Function based on Crisis Management Concept

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

For contributions and assistance in this study, the

author would like to thank Dr. Ir. Albarda, M.T. as

a supervisor, colleagues in School of Electrical En-

gineering and Informatics, Faculty of electrical Engi-

neering, Bandung Institute of Technology who par-

ticipated in this study, colleagues in Technical Im-

plementation Unit for Mine’s and Geological Hazard

Mitigation, Indonesian Institute of Sciences, and Min-

istry of Research, Technology and Higher Education

of the Republic of Indonesia who provided funding

for this study.

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