A Guide to Transportation's Role in Public Health Disasters

TRB’s National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) Report 525: Surface Transportation Security, Volume 10: A Guide to Transportation's Role in Public Health Disasters examines development of transportation response options to an extreme event involving chemical, biological, or radiological agents. The report contains technical information on chemical, biological, and radiological threats, including vulnerabilities of the transportation system to these agents and consequence-minimization actions that may be taken within the transportation system in response to events that involve these agents. The report also includes a spreadsheet tool, called the Tracking Emergency Response Effects on Transportation (TERET), that is designed to assist transportation managers with recognition of mass-care transportation needs and identification and mitigation of potential transportation-related criticalities in essential services during extreme events. The report includes a user’s manual for TERET, as well as a PowerPoint slide introduction to chemical, biological, and radiological threat agents designed as an executive-level communications tool based on summary information from the report..

NCHRP Report 525: Surface Transportation Security is a series in which relevant information is assembled into single, concise volumes—each pertaining to a specific security problem and closely related issues. The volumes focus on the concerns that transportation agencies are addressing when developing programs in response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the anthrax attacks that followed. Future volumes of the report will be issued as they are completed.

The National Academies has prepared, in cooperation with the Department of Homeland Security, fact sheets on biological, chemical, nuclear, and radiological terrorist attacks. They were designed primarily for reporters as part of the project News and Terrorism: Communicating in a Crisis, though they will be helpful to anyone looking for a clear explanation of the fundamentals of science, engineering, and health related to such attacks. TRB is a division of the National Academies, which include the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, Institute of Medicine, and National Research Council.