Assessing Emergency Capacity – Emergencies in Iceland’s Search and Rescue Region

Abstract: The capacity of an emergency response system is a deciding factor in its design and development, as well as its consequent success. Given this perspective, it is obvious that it is meaningless to do a risk analysis of a system without examining or knowing its capacity first. But how is capacity evaluated? A literature study was done to find existing methods and it revealed that capacity is a concept most people assign some meaning to but upon further inspection it is quite ill-defined and vaguely used in risk management texts. The project tried to illuminate the concept of capacity and from there bring forth an applicable emergency capacity assessment method. The main conclusion of the literature study was that there is a lack of available emergency capacity assessment methods. A method rooted in decision analysis did however prove to be both operative and enlightening. The decision analysis method was then applied to a case study and its main conclusion was that according to the design criteria chosen for said method, the emergency response system in Iceland cannot be considered to have suitable capacity. Improvement suggestions were made.