Emergency

Summary

An emergency is an urgent, unexpected, and usually dangerous situation that poses an immediate risk to health, life, property, or environment and requires immediate action. Most emergencies require urgent intervention to prevent a worsening of the situation, although in some situations, mitigation may not be possible and agencies may only be able to offer palliative care for the aftermath. While some emergencies are self-evident (such as a natural disaster that threatens many lives), many smaller incidents require that an observer (or affected party) decide whether it qualifies as an emergency. The precise definition of an emergency, the agencies involved and the procedures used, vary by jurisdiction, and this is usually set by the government, whose agencies (emergency services) are responsible for emergency planning and management. Defining an emergency An incident, to be an emergency, conforms to one or more of the following, if it:

Poses an immediate threat to life,

Official source

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency

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Sediment flushing downstream dams: a study on the clogging by fine sediments

Christophe Ancey, Giovanni De Cesare, Romain Maxime Dubuis

Water reservoirs used to produce electricity have an impact on the environment and durability by : • stopping the natural sediment flux • changing the flow regime downstream of the reservoirs • storing (fine) sediments that reduce the storage volume Those 3 issues have been leading to the development of strategies in order to improve the equilibrium of the ecosystem downstream such structures, with solution such as sediment flushing and simple water flushing reproducing flood events. Those operations produce excessive sediment inflow on certain river sections, which can lead to the clogging of the gravel bed. River construction work, soil erosion, emergency actions and natural river bank erosion can also bring similar problematic. For example, a dramatic event happened in 2013 on the Spöl River in Eastern Switzerland. Due to some operations on a Punt dal Gall dam, important amountsof fine sediments were flushed downstream the reservoir and resulted in significant damages to the river ecosystem1. A strong clogging of the river bed was noted. A clean water flushing a few months later led to a cleaning of the clogged areas.

2019

Over the last few decades, rational health care management and, in particular, operating theater planning, has attracted increased attention from practitioners and from the scientific community. However, although the operating theater environment is clearly stochastic, the impact of this randomness has often been ignored. In practice, simple rules based largely on past experience (such as keeping a safety margin), are most frequently used when making plans for the operating theater. In this paper, we propose an approach to help rationalize, at a strategic decision-making level, the way in which stochasticity can be taken into account in operating theater management, to help in the sizing and in the allocation of capacity. The three main sources of randomness are considered: durations of operations, unexpected emergencies and blocking because of a full recovery unit. Based on the Markov theory, our tool enables several performance measures to be estimated. An operating theater manager can use our approach to make informed decisions and assess, for example, the disruption of the planning by emergencies, the waiting times for emergency patients, the impact of the recovery unit, or the distribution of the working time. In particular, our approach helps determine the number of operations that should be planned in order to keep expected overtime limited. The tool is described in detail, discussed, and applied to the illustrative case of a Belgian hospital. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Elsevier2013