A Guide for Assessing Community Emergency Response Needs and Capabilities for Hazardous Materials Releases (2011)

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Development of the Emergency Response Capability Approach Much has been done by federal and state governments since 2002 to standardize the resource typing and definitions of all existing and required capabilities necessary for homeland security and emergency management operations. The Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) publication 508-4 Typed Resource Definitions for Fire and Hazardous Materials Resources (2005) provides three types of hazmat entry teams, based upon a combination of existing standards and based against identified hazards identified at the national level. It is important to note that the Typed Resource Definitions contained within FEMA 508-4 address only National Tier One assets which are utilized under the Emergency Management Assis- tance Compact (EMAC). These Tier One assets are limited to only the most capable resources maintained by select local, state, and/or federal sponsors, such as New York City (NY), Houston (TX), Los Angeles (CA), and other equivalent areas with a sufficient tax base for establishing, training, certifying, equipping, exercising, and maintaining teams and associated personnel on full-time or near full-time availability. The methodology used for this Guide incorporates Tier Two standards for Hazmat Response Teams at the state and local levels. These assessments have tended to focus on planning effective emergency responses to WMD attacks on large metropolitan areas. The focus here is on the smaller communities grouped under Tier 5, fewer than 10,000 individuals, in the draft DHS document. Based upon a review of the National Planning Scenarios and the National Response Framework Incident Annexes, the hazards identified at the national level predominately focus on terrorist or criminal use of specific toxic or dangerous materials during an intentional act, instead of the acci- dental releases associated with the inter/intra-state, multimodal storage and/or transportation of all hazmat. In addition, these federal efforts, such as FEMA 508-4, do not include resource typing cri- teria for the entire resource set necessary to successfully manage a release of hazmat in storage, use, or transportation. For example, FEMA 508-4 provides typing criteria for the Hazardous Materials Response (Emergency Support Function#10) Hazmat Entry Team (pages 13–17) without the inclu- sion of parallel, coordinated typing criteria for casualty decontamination (reference to decontami- nation within FEMA 508-4 is solely for decontamination of the entry team personnel), incident command, and similar supporting elements. A review of the FEMA 508 Typed Resource Definitions series fails to locate any equivalent effort for casualty decontamination; this determination is sup- ported by notes in the draft document listed below requiring the development of a typed resource or mission package to support incident assessment, casualty rescue, and casualty decontamination. DHS (2009) is also in the process of developing a Target Capabilities List (TCL) specific to the Response Capability [for] [Weapons of Mass Destruction] WMD/Hazardous Materials (Hazmat) Rescue. In the existing draft document, the TCL employs a five-class risk system based predominately upon jurisdictional population with additional risk factors for various types and kinds of storage, D-1 A P P E N D I X D Additional Details on Capability Assessment

use, and transportation capabilities. These risk factors do not address pipelines, maritime facilities or transportation, or nonchemical (e.g., biological, radiological, explosive, etc.) storage facilities or industrial manufacturing or use of such nonchemical hazard classes, except under the term “large quantities of hazardous materials.” In developing the methodology for this Guide, the use of two systems defined by “class,” such as the 2008 Emergency Response Guidebook and the draft TCL, poses additional challenges for successful employment and ease of use for the methodology. Therefore, the methodology used in this Guide does not represent verbatim application of these approved or draft documents, but rather incorporates the applicable, approved elements of these documents into the methodology. Risk management is often strongly influenced by the perceived political and social implications of a particular methodology as well as anticipated reactions and bias by specific user communities. This methodology is focused on the scope identified within the project charter to address all hazmat response operations to all identified hazard classes across all applicable modes of transportation and use, which is a scope not addressed by any single regulation, guide, or document approved at the Federal level. Calculating the Risk Metric Equation Table D-1 shows the further development of the terms in the Risk Metric equation. In this case, the ERC value has been calculated and added to each of the hazard scenarios. D-2 A Guide for Assessing Community Emergency Response Needs and Capabilities for Hazardous Materials Releases Hazard [H] Vulner- ability [V] Consequence [C]* Capability [ERC] Response Time [RTF] Risk Metric Facility or Route Description Pop. Env. Facility Z Fire (ethylene) 3 4 2 1 Roads x, y Fire (gasoline) 3 2 1 4 Facility Z Explosion (ethylene) 2 3 2 1 Railroad s BLEVE (ethylene) 4 2 1 4 Facility Z Toxic Gas (chlorine) (L) 3 4 1 3 Facility Z Toxic Gas (chlorine) (S) 4 2 2 1 Railroad s Toxic Gas (chlorine) (L) 3 5 1 3 Railroad s Toxic Gas (chlorine) (S) 4 3 1 1 Roads x, w Toxic Gas (ammonia) (L) 1 4 2 4 Roads x, w Toxic Gas (ammonia) (S) 2 2 1 4 Roads x, u Toxic Liquid (37% HCl) (L) 2 2 2 4 Roads x, u Toxic Liquid (37% HCl) (S) 3 1 1 4 (S) small release; (L) large release. Table D-1. Further development of the risk metric equation—adding the capability value.