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Track: Emergency Management and Public Safety
Robert Kehlet
Defense Special Weapons Agy.
6801 Telegraph Road
Alexandria, VA 22301
Telephone: 703-325-2046
Fax: 703-325-2957
The Use of the Consequences Assessment Tool Set for Emergency Management
Defining Issue: To improve emergency management response by estimating the casualties and damage to infrastructure and facilities caused by natural and technological disasters and the resources needed for relief support. GIS Solution: The GIS application provides the decision makers with graphic presentations of the disaster area and allows for the intersection of numerous georeferenced databases and the hazardous areas for rapid quantitative "rollup" assessments of the consequences of the disaster. Methodology: The Consequences Assessment Tool Set (CATS) combines several disaster models, georeferenced databases, and the GIS. Using this analytical tool, the emergency manager can estimate the impact of the disaster and respond quickly, effectively, and efficiently. CATS provides significant assistance in emergency manager training, exercises contingency planning, logistical planning, and calculating requirements for humanitarian aid. Disasters accounted for in CATS include natural events, such as
hurricanes and earthquakes, and technological hazards, such as chemical releases and terrorist actions using biological or chemical agents. While there are other systems available that permit the display of hazard distributions, CATS emphasizes the calculation and analysis of consequences. The technological hazard component of CATS contains models for converting hazard spatial and temporal distributions into probabilities of casualties, including both mortality and morbidity, and varying levels of damage to facilities, resources, and infrastructure. CATS operates within a full-featured GIS. This allows the user to do far more than merely display graphical representations of hazard footprints on map backgrounds. Rather, CATS' analytical tools enable the user to combine multiple layers of information, hazards, casualty probabilities, and populations to determine the number of personnel affected, as well as levels and extent of property damage and event impact on the infrastructure. It provides the
flexibility to incorporate a wide range of user-specific, georeferenced and attributed, infrastructure, resource and facility databases, all within the spatial context of georeferenced vector, raster, and photographic images. Software: CATS operates on Sun and IBM UNIX workstations. It requires licenses for ArcView Version 2.1 or later, and ArcInfo Version 7.0.3 or later with ARCGRID option, and approximately 5 gigabytes of disk space to accommodate the entire software package including a reasonable amount of geographic, population, and other infrastructure data.
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