Special population planner, version 4.0.

Abstract

Emergencies happen every day. Many are caused by storms or auto accidents and can be planned for, if not predicted. Emergencies resulting from natural hazards often affect a large number of people, and planning for them can be difficult, since knowledge of the needs of the people involved is generally unavailable. Emergencies resulting from accidents at industrial and military facilities can also be large scale in nature if people must be evacuated or sheltered in place. Federal planning for large scale emergencies is the responsibility of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which provides assistance to various emergency management agencies at the national, state and local level. More information about FEMA is available at http://www.fema.gov/. The purpose of the Special Population Planner (SPP) is to help emergency planners address the needs of persons with special needs. The exact definition of 'special population' is a policy decision. Policymakers have included a variety of groups in this term, such as persons with disabilities, those who do not have vehicles with which to evacuate, children who are unattended at times (latchkey children), and many others. The SPP was developed initially for the Alabama Emergency Management Agency as part of its Chemical Stockpile Emergency Preparedness Program (CSEPP), which aids emergency planning and preparedness in communities surrounding military installations across the United States where chemical weapons are stored pending their destruction under federal law. Like that specialized application, this open-source version contains a set of specialized Geographic Information System (GIS) tools to facilitate emergency planning on behalf of persons with special needs, regardless of how the term is defined. While the original SPP system was developed for emergency planning relating to chemical hazards, it can be applied to other threats as well. It is apparent from Hurricane Katrina and other natural and man-made disasters that many of the problems posed by emergency planning for a chemical weapons agent release are shared by other hazards as well. The notion that emergency planning shares common functions underlies the decision by FEMA to include the Chemical Stockpile Emergency Preparedness Program (CSEPP) in its 'all-hazards' planning approach. The CSEPP's official planning guidance operationalizes this approach by suggesting that state and local CSEPP emergency plans 'should be appended to the existing all-hazards emergency plan.' The SPP is programmed as a set of tools within an ESRI ArcMap 9.1 project. ArcMap is a component of both ESRI ArcGIS 9.1 and ESRI ArcView 9.1, and it provides a rich GIS user interface for viewing spatial and tabular data, analyzing it, and producing output reports and maps. This GIS interface has been augmented with the SPP tools for a user interface that provides custom functionality for emergency planning. The system as released also includes some hypothetical example records for special needs populations, facilities, resources, control points and sirens sufficient for showing how the system would work with real information. A GIS database is included with some publicly available example layers. The SPP is designed to support emergency planners as they address emergency management issues, and includes capabilities that support the collection and importing of data, the review of data in a spatial context, and GIS tools for emergency planning. The SPP system allows for the identification and categorization of response zones to allow for multiple levels of preparedness. An Immediate Response Zone (IRZ) might be designated as the area 0 to 10 miles from a facility where the response would be the most urgent. SPP can support more than one set of planning zones to accommodate different types of emergencies or the different jurisdictions of emergency response organizations. These areas can be delineated by any number of criteria that make sense for the area. An area like New Orleans might designate response zones based on the depth above/below sea level, or an urban area may categorize an IRZ as the 'central business district' with the PAZ encompassing the larger outlying area. Many of the sites involved in the CSEPP currently use an integrated emergency response information system to support their emergency management planning. The D2-Puff system (including or WebPuff 2.1) by Innovative Emergency Management, Inc. is the main software serving this purpose. More information on D2-Puff can be found at www.ieminc.com. SPP differs from D2-Puff in that it is designed for planning, not response to assist those with special needs, is programmed within a popular commercial GIS software system, and can be loaded with large amounts of data to support all hazards emergency planning.