A REVIEW ON EFFECTIVENESS OF EMERGENCY TELECOM MUNICATION SYSTEMS IN IRAN

Emergency telecommunicati on systems play fundamental role in disaster risk management, before, during and after the crisis. In fact, any data about disasters and all the informat ion about damages and casualties should be collected and transmitted through reliable telecommunicati on channels to relevant authorities in appropriate time, to be used for decision making and planning for providing necessary responses. Therefore, developing a comprehensive emergency telecommunication network and empowering the capacity of the existing system s should be considered as one of the DRM priorities in all countries subjected to natural hazards. Furthermore, resiliency of telecommunication services should be considered as one of the main goals for assuring proper data transmission at the time of disaster. In this line, besides of robustness of the physical instruments and redundancy in providing necessary services, it is essential to develop relevant telecommunication protocols for the time of crisis (such as ETSI in Europe) and to provide basic training to people and authorit ies for telecommunication after disasters. In addition, having appropriate autonomy in implementing the pla ns at the time of crisis is another requirement of reliable emergency telecommunication.In this paper, having a look on the importance of telecommunication serv ices in earthquake risk mitigation and management, the e xisting telecommunication system in Iran will be introduced and its shortages and problems to be used as emergency telecommunication system will be discussed. Then having a look on the similar systems in othe r countries, a proposal for improvement the ex isting conditions will be presented and discussed.

Keywords:

Earthquake , Emergency , Telecommunication , Response , Vulnerability