• Journal of Trauma and Injury
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• v.36 no.4
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• pp.343-353
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• 2023

Purpose: The COVID-19 pandemic led to significant changes in the lifestyle patterns of children and affected the patterns of pediatric injuries. This study analyzed the changing patterns of pediatric injury overall and by age groups, based on the datasets before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods: This study is based on the data of patients who presented with injuries at 23 hospital emergency departments participating in the Emergency Department-based Injury In-depth Surveillance (EDIIS) conducted by the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency. The surveillance data was categorized by injury mechanism, location, activity, and severity. We analyzed the injury patterns of pediatric patients aged 0 to 15 years. Subgroup analysis was conducted by age group in children aged 7 to 15 years, 1 to 6 years, and <1 year. Results: When comparing the COVID-19 pandemic period to the pre-COVID-19 period, the total number of pediatric patients with injuries decreased by 38.7%, while the proportions of in-home injuries (57.9% vs. 67.9%), and minor injuries (38.9% vs. 39.7%) increased. In the 7 to 15 years group, bicycle riding injuries (50.9% vs. 65.6%) and personal mobility device injuries (2.4% vs. 4.6%) increased. The 1 to 6 years group also showed an increase in bicycle accident injuries (15.8% vs. 22.4%). In the <1 year group, injuries from falls increased (44.5% vs. 49.9%). Self-harm injuries in the 7 to 15 years group also increased (1.6% vs. 2.8%). Conclusions: During the COVID-19 pandemic period, the overall number of pediatric injuries decreased, while injuries occurring at home and during indoor activities increased. Traffic accidents involving bicycles and personal mobility devices and self-harm injuries increased in the 7 to 15 years group. In the <1 year group, the incidence of falls increased. Medical and societal preparedness is needed so that we might anticipate these changes in the patterns of pediatric injuries during future infectious disease pandemics.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.125-134
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• 2017

Unusual precipitation caused by typhoons and severe rain stormscan threaten human life and property. Thus, various organizations prepare emergency action plans (EAPs) to provide proper guidelines for operators, experts, and emergency response personnel to protect and enhance critical infrastructure. For example, FEMA and DHS have various types of EAPs for dams, levees, and other structures to protect people and property. FEMA defines EAPs as official documents to decrease the damage and impact in emergency situations and to reduce casualties. These documents should consider all possible situations in an emergency and can reduce problems in facility management. This study analyzes EAPs for infrastructure from the USA, Japan, and Korea in order to suggest an ideal EAP framework. EAPcontent can include how to guide experts and operators in disaster stages (mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery), how to operate emergency equipment, and how to protect critical infrastructure and life. The suggested EAP framework performed very well in a test location. It can therefore be used for infrastructure organizations in Korea and to inform of the appropriate processes and methods for risk reduction in flood disasters.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.53 no.8
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• pp.2534-2546
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• 2021

Nuclear emergency preparedness and response is an essential part to ensure the safety of nuclear power plant (NPP). Key support technologies of nuclear emergency decision-making usually consist of accident diagnosis, source term estimation, accident consequence assessment, and protective action recommendation. Source term estimation is almost the most difficult part among them. For example, bad communication, incomplete information, as well as complicated accident scenario make it hard to determine the reactor status and estimate the source term timely in the Fukushima accident. Subsequently, it leads to the hard decision on how to take appropriate emergency response actions. Hence, this paper aims to develop a method for rapid source term estimation to support nuclear emergency decision making in pressurized water reactor NPP. The method aims to make our knowledge on NPP provide better support nuclear emergency. Firstly, this paper studies how to build a Bayesian network model for the NPP based on professional knowledge and engineering knowledge. This paper presents a method transforming the PRA model (event trees and fault trees) into a corresponding Bayesian network model. To solve the problem that some physical phenomena which are modeled as pivotal events in level 2 PRA, cannot find sensors associated directly with their occurrence, a weighted assignment approach based on expert assessment is proposed in this paper. Secondly, the monitoring data of NPP are provided to the Bayesian network model, the real-time status of pivotal events and initiating events can be determined based on the junction tree algorithm. Thirdly, since PRA knowledge can link the accident sequences to the possible release categories, the proposed method is capable to find the most likely release category for the candidate accidents scenarios, namely the source term. The probabilities of possible accident sequences and the source term are calculated. Finally, the prototype software is checked against several sets of accident scenario data which are generated by the simulator of AP1000-NPP, including large loss of coolant accident, loss of main feedwater, main steam line break, and steam generator tube rupture. The results show that the proposed method for rapid source term estimation under nuclear emergency decision making is promising.

• Journal of Radiation Protection and Research
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• v.39 no.2
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• pp.109-117
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• 2014

Nuclear emergency planning is to plan sheltering, evacuation and iodine prophylaxis for the residents living in the area where the emergency plan is needed, the area is confirmed based on the dose assessment using the source-term through an accident analysis and the data measured from meteorological tower. In this study, the does change before and after protective measures was assessed stochastically based on the one year meteorological data in the condition of the maximum hypothetical accident which can be considered at the research reactor 'HANARO', and the optimized protective measures were derived based on the reference levels defined as a residual dose by ICRP 2007 recommendation which can be applied in a emergency exposure situation. The optimized protective measures for the HANARO in the maximum hypothetical accident were the evacuation to radius 300 m, the sheltering from 300 m to 800 m, the iodine prophylaxis only for the emergency workers under the protective measures for non emergency workers.

• Journal of Radiation Protection and Research
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• v.21 no.3
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• pp.201-215
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• 1996

Radiation and radioactive materials serve man in many beneficial ways. Diagnostic X-ray, radiation therapy, and other nuclear medicine uses of radioactivity save thousands of lives each year. Industrial application of radiation, such as radiography, make many manufactured products more reliable and less expensive. Nuclear power plants are producing more electrical power each year and reducing our dependence on imported oil. However, radiation can and dose produce harmful effects particularly as the reault of a radiation accident in which a victim receives as the result of a radiation accident in which a victim receives a large dose. Fortunately such accidents are very rare and recently we need more electric power produced by nuclear power plants. Considering increase of use of radiation or radioactive materials, we have to establish the radiological emergency response system prepared for radiation accidents.

• 한국방재학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2008.02a
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• pp.13-18
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• 2008

The 2005 west off Fukuoka earthquake with Mjma 7.0 occurred in the vicinity of Fukuoka city with 1.4 million populations, which had been regarded as rather seismically inactive in Japan. The strong motion records by K-net indicated PGV of 64 cm/s in Fukuoka city and some condominium buildings sustained extensive non-structural damages. In this study, we conducted a questionnaire survey for residents of 8 condominium buildings located in the downtown area of Fukuoka city after the earthquake. The results indicate that damaged nonstructural walls and distorted doors disrupted evacuation route for many occupants, and furniture and content damage on upper floors became severer resulting in higher rates of human casualty. Earthquake preparedness for indoor safety was raised after the earthquake, though further safety measures can be advised. In the phase of post-earthquake emergency and restoration period, residents' management organizations play important roles, so that neighborhood activities to promote communication networks are important in urban environment with aging population.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Aviation and Aeronautics
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• v.21 no.4
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• pp.126-136
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• 2013

Aircraft accidents these days, following the mega sizing trend of the aircraft, result in enormous losses of human lives apart from those of property, which cannot be replaced by any means. As most recently, in April 20, 2012, a Boeing 737 passenger plane departed Karachi on an augural flight to Islamabad, Pakistan, crashed close to an express highway on final approach, all 121 passengers and 6 crew members were killed. As such a large number of fatalities have been recorded in aircraft accidents while accident investigation results show that more than 95% of aircraft accidents are now survivable. There are three basic stages in surviving the aircraft accident: surviving the crash impact, the evacuation process and the hostile post evacuation environmental elements. These stages require the cabin crew's expeditious and appropriate actions on the basis of systematic and thorough cabin safety training in order to increase occupants' survivability, along with the passengers' preparedness. In this aspect, this paper examines the issues acting as the impediments to the passenger survival in inflight emergency situations, that are the deficiencies with cabin crew safety training, related performances and the shortcomings in passengers' knowledge on inflight safety information, leading to their inappropriate responses to emergency situations. These issues are analyzed and the root causes are identified, suggesting the resolving countermeasures.

• Proceedings of the Korea Water Resources Association Conference
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• 2022.05a
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• pp.145-145
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• 2022

Availability of abundant water resources data in developing countries is a great concern that has hindered the adoption of deep learning techniques (DL) for disaster prevention and mitigation. On the contrary, over the last two decades, a sizeable amount of DL publication in disaster management emanated from developed countries with efficient data management systems. To understand the current state of DL adoption for solving water-related disaster management in developing countries, an extensive bibliometric review coupled with a theory-based analysis of related research documents is conducted from 2003 - 2022 using Web of Science, Scopus, VOSviewer software and PRISMA model. Results show that four major disasters - pluvial / fluvial flooding, land subsidence, drought and snow avalanche are the most prevalent. Also, recurrent flash floods and landslides caused by irregular rainfall pattern, abundant freshwater and mountainous terrains made India the only developing country with an impressive DL adoption rate of 50% publication count, thereby setting the pace for other developing countries. Further analysis indicates that economically-disadvantaged countries will experience a delay in DL implementation based on their Human Development Index (HDI) because DL implementation is capital-intensive. COVID-19 among other factors is identified as a driver of DL. Although, the Long Short Term Model (LSTM) model is the most frequently used, but optimal model performance is not limited to a certain model. Each DL model performs based on defined modelling objectives. Furthermore, effect of input data size shows no clear relationship with model performance while final model deployment in solving disaster problems in real-life scenarios is lacking. Therefore, data augmentation and transfer learning are recommended to solve data management problems. Intensive research, training, innovation, deployment using cheap web-based servers, APIs and nature-based solutions are encouraged to enhance disaster preparedness.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.19 no.4
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• pp.132-137
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• 2018

Although the number of chemical accidents has been declining since the Chemical Control Act of 2015, there have been repeated occurrences of similar types of accidents at printed circuit board (PCB) manufacturing facilities. These accidents were caused by the overflow of hydrochloric acid and hydrogen peroxide, which are toxic chemicals used in the printed circuit board manufacturing process. An analysis of the $Cl^-$ content to identify the cause of the accident showed that in the mixed route of hydrochloric acid and hydrogen peroxide, which are accidental substances, the $Cl^-$ concentration was 66.85 ppm in the hydrogen peroxide sample. Through reaction experiments, it was confirmed that the deformation of a PVC storage tank and generation of chlorine gas, which is a toxic gas, occurred due to reaction heat occurring up to $50.5^{\circ}C$. This paper proposes a facility safety management plan, including overcharge, overflow prevention, leak detection device, and separation tank design for mixing prevention in printed circuit board manufacturing facility etch process. To prevent the recurrence of accidents of the same type, the necessity of a periodic facility safety inspection and strengthening of the safety education of workers was discussed.

• 재활복지
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• v.21 no.2
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• pp.63-88
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• 2017

This study evaluated the actual status of special needs of the hearing-impaired person for disaster response. The analysis revealed a significant level of unmet needs in disaster response for hearing-impaired person. The 5 special needs in disaster response include: 1) communication needs, which involve securing the means to make an emergency rescue request and communicating information during the rescue process; 2) transportation needs, which indicate the effective evacuation capacity and the level of training; 3) medical needs, which address the degree of preparedness for physical and mental emergency measures and the delivery of health information for rescue and first aid process; 4) maintaining functional independence needs, which refer to the level of self-preparedness to minimize damage in disaster situations, and; 5) supervision needs, which correspond to a personalized support system provided to disaster-vulnerable groups.