Disasters can be natural and human-initiated events that interrupt the usual functioning of people on a large scale. Region where disasters have occurred causes hazards to the public of that area and to the rescue teams. Disaster causes the damage to the communication network infrastructure also. Once the communication infrastructure is damaged, it is very difficult to the rescue teams to actively involve in relief operation. To handle these hazards, different wireless technologies can be initiated in the area of disaster. This paper discusses the innovative wireless technology for disaster management. Specifically, issues related to the broadcast scheduling problem in wireless mesh network is deployed efficiently during disaster relief are discussed. A domain specific memetic algorithm is proposed for solving the optimum time division multiple access broadcast scheduling problem in wireless mesh networks. The aim is to increase the total number of transmissions in optimized time slot with high channel utilization in a less computation time. Simulation results showed that our memetic algorithm approach to this problem achieves 100% convergence to solutions within reduced computation time while compared to recent efficient algorithms. The results were compared with several heuristic and non-heuristic algorithms for broadcast scheduling problem. © 2013 Elsevier GmbH.