ABSTRACT
People who manage emergency events face many challenges. This chapter focuses on the human factors challenges that are experienced by managers who deal with emergency events. The emergency management sector performs a critical role in attempting to mitigate the harmful effects of a hazard that may develop into an emergency or even a disaster. As world populations continue to grow, more people become vulnerable to the impacts of emergency events. Emergency events are dynamic and, at times, unpredictable as situations continue to evolve and change. Common incident management systems are central to managing the potential for large, complex, temporally challenging and dangerous incidents. Increasing amounts of data, greater specialisation, and the combination of increasing incident complexity and greater expectations of emergency managers all pose an enormous challenge for decision makers. Finally, this chapter also provides an overview of this book.
