The study of preparedness level of military units personnel in the event of probable earthquake in Tehran

Iran is one of the top ten natural disaster-prone countries that cause major financial and human losses annually. The extent of destruction caused by natural disasters especially earthquakes, flood etc covers vast areas of the country. On the other hand, most of disasters are unexpected ones and even if they are gradual, they do not give man enough time to deal with. Tehran is of crucial importance as the capital of Iran due to the highly concentrated population as well as its economic and political decision-makers organizations and institutions, however, an earthquake will result in a national catastrophe. Considering the tremendous extent of the crisis caused by an earthquake in this city, the crisis managing organizations should have the proper potentiality to control the situation and the presence of military units in order to control and reduce damages and the relieve the pain of affected people. However, in this research, preparedness of two military units of the Armed Forces (Mohammad Rasul Allah division 27th and Seyed al Shohada 10th division) was compared based on seven indicators such as trained manpower against natural disasters; storage system to manage the rescue & relief support; specialized equipment of rescue & relief operational teams; timely allocation of budgets for disaster preparation; proper organization to conduct rescue & relief operations; the current information systems; and effectiveness of the emergency operations. In this descriptive survey, 100 persons were selected and studied by using questionnaire and simple random sampling; also, data were analyzed by singlesample t and independent-sample t tests. according to the findings, preparedness of military units is proper and desirable. In all the studied factors, the preparedness of Seyed al Shohada 10th Division was higher than Mohammad Rasul Allah Division 27th. The results show that the military forces are prepared to react appropriately during and after a probable earthquake in Tehran city.