Date of Award
May 2019
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Civil Engineering
Committee Member
Jennifer Ogle
Committee Member
Mashrur Chowdhury
Committee Member
Ronald Chrestman
Committee Member
Eric Morris
Abstract
Mutual aid agreements are the cornerstone to fast and efficient delivery of aid in emergency situations. Emergency response industries, such as firefighters and police, as well as some transportation modes, such air and rail, rely on these agreements to prepare and plan for disasters. Bus-centric transportation agencies are well positioned and willing to respond to aid requests although these agencies lack formal, written agreements for how aid will be provided. An exploratory survey to all federally funded transit agencies operating bus service revealed that 70.2% of agencies do not have local, written mutual aid agreements (N=683, s=131). While some state-level agreements exist and may result in all of an agency’s resources being used in a large-scale emergency response, these agreements do not exist at the local level.
Through an analysis of Intrastate Mutual Aid Agreements from across the United States, elements needed to establish local, bilateral mutual aid agreements were extracted, synthesized, and organized into an online form-based platform. This tool is referenced as ForMAAT – Form-based Mutual Aid Agreement Tool. It is designed to assist bus-centric transportation agencies in the creation of mutual aid agreements. Although many components of the mutual aid agreement are transferable across industries, the request, acknowledgement, and rendition of aid are tailored for use by bus agencies.
Participatory Action Research was employed to refine ForMAAT to meet practitioners’ needs and validate its utility for bus transportation agencies. Through a series of five focus groups – expert review, organization focus group, legal review, two transit practitioners focus groups, and functional requirement testing, ForMAAT’s clarity, organization and user satisfaction was improved.
During multiple levels of the review process, participants were asked to rate the importance of each question as to whether it was essential for an immediate use mutual aid agreement (developed during a current emergency) or if it was better suited for planning purposes. Content validity ratios were applied to these ratings to isolate those questions needed to construct an immediate use mutual aid agreement. All questions are included during a planning exercise, when time is not an issue.
Ultimately, every participant who interacted with ForMAAT gave it a positive utility score. Participants agreed that the lack of resources and emergency management experience within the agency precludes many of them from developing these plans on their own. There was a collective desire to see this product further refined beyond a beta version to implementation to fill this gap. The iterative process of participatory action research proved effective in refining ForMAAT into a desired product which meets the needs of bus-centric transportation agencies desiring to establish local mutual aid agreements.
Recommended Citation
Moreland, Katerina V., "Validation of a Form Based Mutual Aid Agreement Tool for Use by Bus-Centric Transportation Agencies" (2019). All Dissertations. 2394.
https://open.clemson.edu/all_dissertations/2394