Hurricane Harvey, Texas, and All of Us

This has been quite the extraordinary week with the solar eclipse (amazing) on August 21 followed only a few days later by Hurricane Harvey (horrific), which is causing "epic, catastrophic" flooding in Houston, Texas,  the 4th most populated city in the US. 

The path of the hurricane can be viewed here. 

To emphasize the significance of this natural disaster, which has been called a one in a 500 year flood, major news sites such as The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times, have all removed their paywalls, which is also being already referred to as the worst natural disaster to ever hit Texas.

You may ask, why worry about what is happening in Texas? First of all, this natural disaster hits "close to home." As an academic,  I know many faculty at universities in Texas and to see some closing down, making tough decisions as to what to do with students, and when to reopen,  reminds me of Hurricane Sandy back in October 2012 when my daughter was a college freshman and her college (as did many in the affected areas of the Northeast) closed, and she could not even make it back to Amherst because there was no public transportation due to fuel shortages. A niece of mine had just started her freshman year at Tulane University in New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina struck but she had had sufficient warning that she was able to get a flight back to Kansas and that university was closed for an entire semester. And my daughter had spent the summer before her senior year of college as an intern researcher at the marvelous Lunar and Planetary Institute, which is located in Houston. I remember her flying from Sweden where she was visiting me when I had an appointment as a Visiting Professor at the University of Gothenburg and flying then to Houston, which had had some rain, and I was worried at that point about flooding. Now, because of Hurricane Harvey, there are very few passable roads in the surrounding Houston area, flights are halted at both Houston airports (how would crews and workers even make it there?), hospitals are without power and running water, and folks are being told to shelter in place and to bring axes to their attics so that they can break through attics to the rooftops to be rescued. 911 operators are overwhelmed with calls.

There are many questions being raised as, for example, why was Houston not evacuated? 
And the relatively new FEMA Director is saying that recovery from the deadly Harvey disaster "could take years."


The last time I was in Texas was last May, when the NSF-funded Workshop on Disrupting Illicit Supply Networks, took place at the University of Texas Austin. It was a fascinating workshop with a focus on human trafficking with very dedicated researchers and practitioners in attendance. Since Hurricane Harvey struck, I have sent messages to operations research colleagues at Texas A&M University, UTAustin, and Rice University, which is in Houston, and, although I have not heard back (yet) from them, I do hope that they are in a safe place.

If you recall Hurricane Katrina, which was the costliest natural disaster, and occurred in August 2005 (Superstorm Sandy was the second costliest one in the US),  the Annual INFORMS Conference (which is the conference of my major professional society) was supposed to take place that Fall in New Orleans - the conference did take place but was moved to San Francisco that November. This year, our INFORMS Conference is supposed to take place in Houston in October! Time will tell but, in the meantime, we have all those dealing and struggling with Hurricane Harvey in our hearts and prayers.

Houston, not only because of its size is so crucial to the US, but it is also an oil and gas hub. Hence, there could be major economic ramifications, and perhaps even environmental ones due to the destruction by Hurricane Harvey. And, it was the primary residence of the Isenberg family (Gene Isenberg was the former CEO of Nabors Industries) and our School of Management at UMass Amherst bears his name.

I do a lot of work in the disaster research area and also teach a course on humanitarian logistics and in recent papers we have focused on, among other topics, issues of coordination post disasters of relief agencies using game theory. A paper of ours on the topic is: A Generalized Nash Equilibrium Network Model for Post-Disaster Humanitarian Relief, Anna Nagurney, Emilio Alvarez Flores, and Ceren Soylu, Transportation Research E 95: (2016), pp 1-18. For a general audience I wrote an article on the topic for The Conversation: How disaster relief efforts could be improved with game theory. Also recently, we published an article on the importance of communications in emergencies: FirstNet for emergency communications: 6 questions answered. 

And my most recent co-edited book, with Ilias S. Kotsireas and Panos M. Pardalos, which includes very timely papers, even on evacuation networks, is: Dynamics of Disasters; Key Concepts, Models, Algorithms, and Insights.

Thinking of all those in Texas suffering through this natural disaster and the rains are to continue for several more days!

Our Dynamics of Disasters Book is Published!

The good news arrived Thanksgiving Day in the evening.

The book that I had co-edited with Professor Ilias S. Kotsireas of Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada and Professor Panos M. Pardalos of the University of Florida had been published and was available already also in electronic format.

The book, Dynamics of Disasters: Key Insights, Models, Algorithms, and Insights, published by Springer International Publishing Switzerland, is an outgrowth of a conference that we had co-organized in the summer of 2015, which had been held in Kalamata, Greece. The book contains 18 refereed book chapters as well as a preface written by the co-editors and the Table of Contents, Preface, and all contributors can be downloaded in pdf format. 

In addition, to submissions from conference participants and speakers a call also went out for paper submissions. Since we have been working in this area for a while and since I also each spring teach a course on Humanitarian Logistics and Healthcare at the Isenberg School of Management excellent contributions were received, including several from practitioners, and contributors from the United Nations.
 
Working on this book was a true labor of love and I could not have asked for more generous and wonderful co-editors, and the same goes to all of the reviewers, who will remain anonymous, but whose careful reading of the submitted papers and constructive suggestions were very much appreciated.

In the photo below, taken in Kalamata, Greece, I am standing with from left to right Dr. Fuad Aleskerov, Dr. Panos M. Pardalos, Dr. Ilias S. Kotsireas, and Dr. Burcu Balcik.

Aleskerov, Pardalos, Kotsireas, and I are co-organizing the next Dynamics of Disasters conference, which will be held July 5-9, 2017, also in Kalamata, Greece.  The program committee consists of outstanding scientists from around the globe.

The chapters in our Dynamics of Disasters book and the names of the contributors are below.

	Chapters	Authors
	Preface, Contents, Authors	Illias S. Kotsireas, Anna Nagurney, and Panos M. Pardalos, Editors
1	An Assessment of the Impact of Natural and Technological Disasters Using a DEA Approach	Fuad Aleskerov, Sergey Demin
2	Selective Routing for Post-Disaster Needs Assessment	Burcu Balcik
3	Bridging the Gap: Preparing for Long-Term Infrastructure Disruptions	Rasmus Dahlberg
4	Multi-Hazard Scenarios and Impact Mapping for a Protected Built Area in Bucharest, as a Base for Emergency Planning	Emil-Sever Georgescu, Cristian Iosif Moscu, Claudiu Sorin Dragomir, Daniela Dobre
5	Lean Thinking and UN Field Operations: A Successful Co-existence?	Sulejman Halilagic, Dimitris Folinas
6	Collaborative Incident Planning and the Common Operational Picture	Georgios Marios Karagiannis, Costas E. Synolakis
7	Metaheuristic Optimization for Logistics in Natural Disasters	Thomai Korkou, Dimitris Souravlias, Konstantinos Parsopoulos, Konstantina Skouri
8	Tsunami of the Meteoric Origin	Andrey Kozelkov, Efim Pelinovsky
9	The Donation Collections Routing Problem	Emmett J. Lodree, Derek Carter, Emily Barbee
10	Network Criticality and Network Complexity Indicators for the Assessment of Critical Infrastructures During Disasters	Evangelos Mitsakis, Josep Maria Salanova, Iraklis Stamos, Emmanouil Chaniotakis
11	Freight Service Provision for Disaster Relief: A Competitive Network Model with Computations	Anna Nagurney
12	A Mean-Variance Disaster Relief Supply Chain Network Model for Risk Reduction with Stochastic Link Costs, Time Targets, and Demand Uncertainty	Anna Nagurney, Ladimer S. Nagurney
13	A Review of Current Earthquake and Fire Preparedness Campaigns: What Works?	Gabriela Perez-Fuentes, Enrica Verrucci, Helene Joffe
14	The Impact of the Syria Crisis on Lebanon	Denise Sumpf, Vladimir Isaila, Kristine Najjar
15	Absenteeism Impact on Local Economy During a Pandemic via Hybrid SIR Dynamics	E. W. Thommes, M. G. Cojocaru, Safia Athar
16	Tornado Detection with Kernel-Based Classifiers from WSR-88D Radar Data	Theodore B. Trafalis, Budi Santosa, Michael B. Richman
17	Evacuation Modeling and Betweenness Centrality	Chrysafis Vogiatzis, Panos M. Pardalos
18	Ode to the Humanitarian Logistician: Humanistic Logistics Through a Nurse’s Eye	Deborah Wilson

The network that we are building in humanitarian logistics, emergency preparedness, and disaster relief is truly special.

For example, just a few days ago, it was special to be able to introduce my doctoral student, Deniz Besik, to Professor Burcu Balcik, at, appropriately, the WORMS (Women in Operations Research and the Management Sciences) Awards lunch at the INFORMS Annual Meeting in Nashville, Tennessee.

Last year, I had the pleasure of co-hosting, along with the Transportation Center, Dr. George Karagiannis' visit and talk at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, which I also blogged about. He has conducted several risk assessments of nations including one for Malta, a country I have always wanted to visit.

Also, Rasmus Dahlberg, a speaker at our conference and a contributor to our book, gave two talks last spring at the Isenberg School of Management, and I sponsored his visit, in part. He is an amazing emergency expert, with a focus on the arctic, as well as a novelist and a radio TV personality in Denmark. The students in my Humanitarian Logistic and Healthcare class and I wished that he could have stayed longer!

In the Spring 2015, I had hosted Debbie Wilson, who spoke in my class, and she is one of the bravest women I have ever had the privilege of meeting. She spoke to my students about her work battling Ebola in Liberia with Doctors Without Borders during the immense healthcare crisis in the Fall of 2014 and, suitably, our Dynamics of Disasters volume ends with her terrific contribution.

Also, in our book is a chapter by Dr. Denise Sumpf and colleagues from the United Nations, on the Syrian crisis and ramifications for Lebanon. We hosted Dr. Sumpf in Spring 2008,  as part of our UMass Amherst INFORMS Speaker Series, which the great UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter helps me to organize. What an amazing list of speakers we had that spring, including INFORMS Fellow and National Academy of Engineering member, Dr. John Birge!

Finally, we are delighted that Dr. Emmett Lodree, also has a co-authored paper in our book. Lodree was one of the speakers in the Humanitarian Logistics: Networks for Africa conference that I organized at the Rockefeller Foundations' Bellagio Center on Lake Como in Italy in May 2008. Dr.  Panos M. Pardalos was also one of the speakers and the full program and speaker presentation slides can be accessed from the Supernetwork Center website.

Thanks to all those who made our Dynamics of Disasters: Key Insights, Models, Algorithms, and Insights, possible and let the discussions and research with implementation in practice continue!