Application of management engineering for disaster management in Turkey

Disasters have continuously affected our community since our existence. As a result, disaster management started to play an important role in the livelihood of our community. Disaster management process contains four phrases; i.e. mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery. These stages are not clearly separable from each other but they are useful to analyze in order to plan our activities. Among disasters, the primary focus of this study is forest fire initial response coordination (FFIRC). Initiating firefighting activities on time, especially arrival of fire water tender and ground team onto fire areas in critical response time is crucial for effective fighting against forest fires. Turkey suffers from forest fires which cause the loss of forest fauna, products and living organisms. Every forest fire causes losses in terms of scientific and environmental value as well as financial losses. In 2003, 2,177 fire cases occurred in Turkey, and 6,644 hectare forests were burnt. As a result, total loss was 21,883,721 TL. Therefore, the effective FFIRC plays a vital part in the formation of forest fires response plan. In this study, a heuristic model is proposed in order to coordinate responses needed to suppress the forest fires in Turkey. The system is applied to potential forest fire zones by considering 9 Regional Forest Directorates and 14 airports in Turkey. Additionally, Network Analyst toolbox under ArcGIS program is used to determine optimum route that minimize arrival time to forest fires. This study investigates the large-scale forest fires occurred in Turkey. It can be clearly stated that the future losses can be minimized by using the effective FFIRC heuristic proposed in this study.