Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF DISASTER RISK REDUCTION, cilt.5, ss.107-116, 2013 (SCI-Expanded)
The World Health Organization defines a disaster as any occurrence that causes damage, destruction, ecological disruption, loss of human life, human suffering, deterioration of health and health services on a scale sufficient to warrant an extraordinary response from outside the affected community or area (Haghani and Oh, 1996 [1]). Natural disasters can be devastating in terms of human injuries and economic damages. For example, the two earthquakes that occurred in the Marmara region of Turkey in 1999 caused over 20,000 casualties and resulted in the collapse of more than 110,000 buildings (Karaman et al., 2008 [2]). The total cost of damage from these two earthquakes is estimated to range between 9 and 13 billion dollars (Bibbee et al., 2000 [3]). And in the recent Van, Ercis earthquakes, 644 people died and 35,000 houses collapsed (Van, Turkey Earthquake, 2011 [4]).