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Suggested Citation:"Chapter 1 - Overview of the Approach." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2011. A Guide for Assessing Community Emergency Response Needs and Capabilities for Hazardous Materials Releases. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/14502.
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Suggested Citation:"Chapter 1 - Overview of the Approach." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2011. A Guide for Assessing Community Emergency Response Needs and Capabilities for Hazardous Materials Releases. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/14502.
×
Page 6
Page 7
Suggested Citation:"Chapter 1 - Overview of the Approach." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2011. A Guide for Assessing Community Emergency Response Needs and Capabilities for Hazardous Materials Releases. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/14502.
×
Page 7
Page 8
Suggested Citation:"Chapter 1 - Overview of the Approach." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2011. A Guide for Assessing Community Emergency Response Needs and Capabilities for Hazardous Materials Releases. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/14502.
×
Page 8
Page 9
Suggested Citation:"Chapter 1 - Overview of the Approach." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2011. A Guide for Assessing Community Emergency Response Needs and Capabilities for Hazardous Materials Releases. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/14502.
×
Page 9
Page 10
Suggested Citation:"Chapter 1 - Overview of the Approach." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2011. A Guide for Assessing Community Emergency Response Needs and Capabilities for Hazardous Materials Releases. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/14502.
×
Page 10

Below is the uncorrected machine-read text of this chapter, intended to provide our own search engines and external engines with highly rich, chapter-representative searchable text of each book. Because it is UNCORRECTED material, please consider the following text as a useful but insufficient proxy for the authoritative book pages.

The approach detailed in this Guide walks you, an emergency planning organization official, through a prescribed process with discrete steps and outputs that combine to inform decision making about response planning for hazmat incidents. In following this Guide, you can: • Identify response capabilities and their locations (Chapter 2); • Define desired emergency response performance objectives specific to your jurisdiction (Chapter 3); • Identify any shortfalls in response capabilities based on the performance objectives selected (identified in Chapter 3 and carried into Chapter 8); • Identify the specific materials of concern located in or transported through your jurisdiction and the potential hazards they represent (Chapter 4); • Estimate the potential consequences from a release of the hazmat you identified (Chapter 5); • Establish the impacts of qualified emergency response and its proximity to the location of potential incidents (Chapter 6); • Assess how well response coverage aligns with the location and type of hazmat (Chapter 7); • Identify shortfalls in capabilities identified in the coverage, considering severity of release consequences (Chapter 8); • Make decisions about how to address specific shortfalls in response coverage (Chapter 9); and • Sustain the process over time (Chapter 10). Use of the Risk Assessment Tool A risk assessment tool, developed using Microsoft® Excel, has separate worksheet tabs for the steps outlined in the 10 chapters. This tool is designed to lead you through the assessment process using separate worksheets for most of the steps defined in this Guide. As described below, the process is designed to be thorough, yet flexible. The tool is designed to identify any shortfalls that result as you proceed through the process. The tool is available to emergency response planners on the attached CD-ROM. Balancing Assessment with Planning Capabilities of a Local Emergency Response Organization The capabilities of emergency response planning organizations vary greatly. Some have access to very detailed assessment tools at every fire station, and larger metropolitan areas have emergency response personnel with extensive training and experience in emergency response. Others are made up of volunteers with more than adequate emergency response training but little planning assessment capability. This Guide is designed to have sufficient flexibility to be usable by any organization, irrespective of their emergency response planning capabilities. The approach is 5 C H A P T E R 1 Overview of the Approach

designed to be comprehensive, yet flexible. For example, if you are in a state that certifies the Tier Response Level of emergency response teams, then Chapter 2 steps have already been sat- isfied and all that is required is to note the Tier Response Level. If your organization has estab- lished its Jurisdictional Response goals as outlined by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), then the steps in Chapter 3 can be quickly reviewed and the results noted. If there are shortfalls identified in Chapter 3, you may decide to satisfy the gap identified before proceed- ing with subsequent steps. Gaps identified at this stage will probably amplify in each succeed- ing step. The flexibility in the assessment process is probably best shown in the assessments outlined in Chapters 4 and 5. The text outlines an approach that attempts to comprehensively identify the hazmat in the region in Chapter 4, and then estimate the consequences of accidental materials in Chapter 5. In a comprehensive analysis, an attempt would be made to identify the classes/divisions of hazmat in the region without regard to the frequency of shipments. If the results of a thorough commodity flow survey are not available, the assessor can choose to analyze a smaller number of hazmat, perhaps considering the most commonly shipped material, typically Class 3 flammables, and then consider a suite of other classes/divisions that might have more severe consequences. For example, ammonia, a Class 2 gas, is typically transported in farming areas. Sulfuric acid, a Class 8 corrosive, may be common in urban areas. Areas with plants that produce or use highly hazardous chemicals would clearly want to select those chemicals for analysis. From year to year the response capabilities for different chemicals might be assessed. The Chapter 5 analyses might be a place where the greatest flexibility can be realized. The chapter outlines how you could estimate consequences using plume dispersion models. While many emergency responders have access to such tools and commonly use them, others do not. Those who do not can consult the scenarios used to develop the hazard distances in the 2008 American Emergency Response Guidebook (ERG 2008). Transport Canada developed an inter- active version of that guidebook (ERGO 2008) that is very easy to use. It skips a few of the materials that would not be transported in Canada, such as chemical agents, but if those materials were present in a region, they would likely be handled as a special case and not by this planning guide. The point is, the consequences of a release often can be specified without going through all the effort required to develop a plume dispersion model. Appendix A provides a list and description of many useful information sources. Subsequent chapters go through the responses to the hazardous material spills selected in Chapter 4 and whose consequences were estimated in Chapter 5. Once the incidents have been identified, the questions in Chapters 6 through 8 address response capabilities for those selected spills. These should be relatively straightforward to address. The spreadsheet tool helps fill out the assessment results once the local response capabilities have been entered. Chapter 4 ties the entire analysis together. The assessment results are based on the risk equation, which is defined and described later in Chapter 1. One more term is added, vulnerability, described in Appendix B. Like the consequences, the description of the vulnerability estimation process in Appendix B is comprehensive. You have the option to estimate the frequency of a spill based on experience. For example, experience might show that the area will experience three or four flam- mable liquid spills a year. Experience should always trump analysis when estimating vulner- abilities. The example is intended to help with the less commonly shipped materials. Rather than showing all the estimated annual shipment mileage in the region, you could simply estimate the likelihood of a release to be one or more orders of magnitude below that of the flammable liquid spill. There are several ways of using the summary results shown in Chapter 4. Since the risk equa- tion is the product of the numbers in all the columns, columns with high numbers for all sce- 6 A Guide for Assessing Community Emergency Response Needs and Capabilities for Hazardous Materials Releases

Overview of the Approach 7 narios are areas where improvements may be beneficial. Clearly, scenarios with high risk esti- mates would be valuable to address as well. These decisions are the responsibility of the asses- sor or the assessment team. The goal is to make the process more rigorous, not to make it needlessly complicated. Developing a Hazmat Portfolio This Guide recommends using a relative risk-based approach to support hazmat emergency response planning decisions. A risk portfolio (column headings shown in Table 1) is used to manage the results of this process. Each column in Table 1 represents one of the elements used to compute the relative risk metric, and each row represents a particular scenario for which the planning agency needs to consider the appropriate emergency response. A scenario is a unique combination of hazardous material and location, and can also include the specific quantities involved and the frequency with which the material in those quantities is present at that location. Subsequent chapters of this Guide will address specific elements of the risk equation and will build on prior sections, resulting in a complete hazmat portfolio. Defining the Risk Metric While a planning agency may be able to qualitatively determine broad relationships regard- ing the risk of certain materials and the ability of existing emergency response teams to miti- gate the consequences of releases, using a defined process with as many quantitative elements as possible helps to establish a sound basis for policy decisions related to response coverage. The approach outlined in this Guide uses a relative risk metric to capture and integrate all of the ele- ments that contribute to the community’s risk and to inform those policy decisions. This Guide uses the term “metric” to emphasize that the approach does not determine an absolute value of risk, but only a measure that is suitable for supporting planning activities. Calculating the risk metric allows you to determine the response capability that would offset expected consequences from hazmat incidents. In this section, the measure of risk is defined and the overall method- ology is presented. The risk metric is given in Equation 1 and follows the standard three-term representation of risk commonly used in many industries: where H = hazard, V = vulnerability, and C = consequence. Risk Metric H V C= × × ( )1 Hazard [H] (Chapters 1, 4) Vulner- ability [V] (Chapter 1) Consequence [C] (Chapters 1, 5) Capability[ERC] (Chapters 1, 6) Response Time [RTF] (Chapter 1) Risk Metric (Equation 1) (Chapters 1, 7)Facility or Route Description Pop. Env. Table 1. Risk portfolio.

As with all formulations of risk, the fundamental components are the frequency of some event happening combined with the potential consequences of that event. The consequence considers the mitigating effects of response capability and its proximity to potential incidents, as shown in Equation 2: where C = consequence, Cu = potential consequences (unmitigated), ERC = emergency response capability, and RTF = response time [factor]. To be most effective, you should compute the risk metric for each hazard and location, although there may be opportunities to group certain elements together. Each element in the risk equation is discussed in more detail in the following sections and in subsequent chapters. Hazard For this Guide, hazard is a yes/no variable that indicates whether there is a threat or hazard that could be realized in the region. While there are clearly differences in the relative “hazard” posed by different materials, those differences are primarily captured in the consequence term in the risk equation. Hazards (or threats when considering security issues) can be defined for both fixed facilities and transportation. The quantity of a hazardous material present in one location at any time will also affect the potential consequences. In general, the types of hazards posed by hazmat can be arranged into the following seven categories of Incident Release Type: • Fires; • Explosions or BLEVEs (boiling liquid expanding vapor explosion); • Toxic gas releases; • Toxic liquid releases; • Corrosives; • Radioactive materials releases; and • Releases of biologically active materials. In the section where these categories are explained in more detail, it will be shown how all the U.S.DOT HM classes and divisions can be related to these seven categories. These are the seven categories that will be carried through the rest of this Guide. Vulnerability The vulnerability term is a measure of the likelihood that the population or environment will be exposed to threats produced by an incident. There are two ways to consider vulnerability. One approach considers potential release probabilities based on historical or scientific data, while the other approach considers the quantity and frequency of materials present in a given time period, usually 1 year. In this assessment, the hazards present at fixed facilities or along a transport route will be considered. The details of the approach are presented in Chapter 7. C C ERC RTFu= × × ( )2 8 A Guide for Assessing Community Emergency Response Needs and Capabilities for Hazardous Materials Releases

Consequence The consequence term is a measure of the potential impacts to the population or environment from a release of hazmat. There are many factors to consider when estimating these impacts. Rather than determine a specific consequence value, this Guide uses a method to assign a relative value for the two different types of consequences: population and environment. These consequences are measured assuming no effective emergency response. This enables the effectiveness of the emergency response to be captured in the response time and emergency response capability terms in the risk equation. For each scenario in the hazardous materials portfolio, both population and environmental consequences will be estimated and the maximum of the two estimates will be used in the risk equation. Emergency Response Capability For each hazard, the capability is measured by the ability of the emergency response team to place trained individuals at the scene of the incident with the proper response equipment. The emergency response capability term is used to represent the capabilities of the available response teams to effectively mitigate specific incident scenarios. The capabilities of any resource are based upon how that resource is organized, trained, certified, equipped, exercised, evaluated, and sustained. For this Guide, the appropriate level of response for hazmat incidents is organized into five tiers beyond the baseline level of response that would be expected for any U.S. fire department and is consistent with Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) response team classifi- cations for the higher levels of response capability. The appropriate level of response for a particular scenario in the hazardous materials portfolio is initially determined by the potential consequences from that scenario and the type of jurisdiction, recognizing that very rural jurisdictions need not have the same emergency response capabilities as densely populated urban jurisdictions. Response Time The response time factor has three major components. These include the time it takes for the: • Incident to be reported; • First responders to arrive on the scene and begin managing the incident; and • Specialized hazmat emergency response team to arrive on the scene and take over management of the incident. The concept is, if the appropriate response occurs later than desired, it will be less effective and will not reduce consequences as much as if it occurs more quickly. Summary of Risk Metric Evaluation Steps The risk metric equation terms developed in the last five subsections are developed further in the balance of this Guide with a series of steps for performing two functions. In some steps, you specify the performance goals for your assessment region. The goals are based on the population in the assessment region as modified by the types and quantities of hazmat present in the assess- ment region. You define the extent of the region and your performance goals and objectives. In other steps, the terms of the risk equation are evaluated and they are compared to your goals and performance objectives to determine if there are any shortfalls in the emergency response coverage in your region. The individual scenario values for the risk metric are used to prioritize any shortfalls in emergency response coverage. Overview of the Approach 9

10 A Guide for Assessing Community Emergency Response Needs and Capabilities for Hazardous Materials Releases As can be seen in Figure 1, the first five steps define the capabilities of the emergency response region being assessed and then establish jurisdictional response objectives for the region. The next four steps, Steps 6 through 9, develop the risk portfolio for the region based on the hazard present. The remaining 11 steps develop successive terms in the risk metric equation. The terms in the risk metric equation that are defined in Chapter 1 are displayed in brackets above the steps where the terms are quantified. In subsequent sections, after the method of quantifying each term in the risk metric equation, the step number and a brief description of the step are presented. Figure 1. Steps to evaluate the risk metric and thereby identify capability shortfalls.

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TRB’s Hazardous Materials Cooperative Research Program (HMCRP) Report 5: A Guide for Assessing Community Emergency Response Needs and Capabilities for Hazardous Materials Releases provides step-by-step guidance on assessing hazardous materials emergency response needs at the state, regional, and local levels. The report also addresses matching state, regional, and local capabilities with potential emergencies involving different types of hazardous materials, and offers an assessment on how quickly resources can be expected to be brought to bear in an emergency.

The methodology described in HMCRP Report 5 is designed to be scalable, allowing the implementation results to be aggregated at the local level up through regional, state, and national levels. The guide includes a spreadsheet tool—available online and on CD-ROM with the print version of the report—that is designed to help lead planners through the assessment process.

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