Disaster Ergonomics: a Human Factors approach to address escalating challenges from disasters

Recent disasters occurring as natural events, industrial incidents, and public health crises, impose unprecedented challenges to humans and communities. Increasing uncertainty and complexity of disasters require multidisciplinary research efforts due to various elements involved in a disaster management system (DMS). Despite the growing body of knowledge regarding disasters, an Ergonomics approach toward the DMS is still limited. To address such a research gap, the current paper presents a Disaster Ergonomics framework that incorporates three essential system elements: demands from a disaster, strategies of responders and response organizations to satisfy the demands, and disaster tools and technologies to bridge the demands and the strategies. Especially, the framework is built upon three pillars of the DMS: resource management, command and coordination, and information and communication. As a form of simple validation, an analysis of 2017 Hurricane Harvey was conducted in line with the framework. Recommended future research topics and directions for full validation of the Disaster Ergonomics framework are also discussed.