Response Personnel Research Articles

BEHAVIOR-BASED SAFETY PROCESSES IN ARCTIC OIL SPILL RESPONSE

ABSTRACT The Alaska North Slope region is a challenging operating environment. During spill response operations, worksite hazards are magnified and ensuring safety of response personnel becomes more difficult. In the Incident Management Team, the Safety Officer develops a Site Safety Plan to identify hazards and establish guidelines for safe operations. This information is typically communicated to the field workers when they check-in at the Staging Area or other assigned location. The Site Safety Plan alone, however, fails to address specific behaviors of the personnel that lead to unsafe activities. Behavior-Based Safety Processes fill in this missing piece. The PIRATE Process is an example of behavior-based safety at work. PIRATE - Personal Involvement Reduces Accidents to Everyone - is a fundamental part of the safety culture in the Greater Prudhoe Bay operating area. The March 2006 Gathering Center 2 (GC-2) Transit Line oil spill response presented significant challenges to all involved: extreme weather conditions, congested work areas, spilled oil on frozen lake and tundra environments, and complex field operations competing for personnel and resources. Daily involvement with PIRATE (and similar North Slope Behavior-Based Safety Processes) has made the workforce acutely aware of each individuar'S role in workplace safety, enhancing the overall safety performance of the organization. This poster shows some of the difficulties of a complex arctic oil spill response, and the application of Behavior-Based Safety Processes to enable safe and efficient operations in the face of these challenges.

THE IMPACT OF NATIONAL INCIDENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM TRAINING REQUIREMENTS ON THE PRIVATE SECTOR

ABSTRACT In the National Incident Management System (NIMS) Document dated March 1, 2004, all federal, state, local, tribal, private sector and non-governmental personnel with a direct role in emergency management and response were required to be NIMS and Incident Command System (ICS) trained. National standards for qualification and certification of emergency response personnel were established under NIMS to ensure that personnel possess the minimum knowledge, skills, and experience necessary to execute incident management and emergency response activities safely and effectively. Most recently documented in the National Response Framework, all mid-level managers of federal, state, and local governmental personnel are encouraged to complete ICS-300 and ICS-400 training in fiscal year 2007. Although these standards will greatly improve the ability for governmental personnel to respond in emergencies, private sector personnel are not regulated to participate in the same qualification and certification process. At this time, NIMS has no legal authority to place these requirements on industry personnel, such as members of oil spill management teams. The resulting imbalance of qualification and certification requirements between these two groups could severely hinder oil spill response efforts in the near future by causing miscommunication in the Unified Command during critical points in the response, including when setting response objectives and sharing resources. However, the solution cannot be to pass further governmental regulations on an already highly-regulated community. The NIMS Integration Center should consider utilizing the existing partnerships in individual regions, particularly through the Area Committee and the Area Maritime Security Committee, to solve this issue before it becomes a significant problem in the middle of a large-scale response effort.

NOAA OFFICE OF RESPONSE AND RESTORATION'S ROLE DURING OIL SPILLS WHERE MARINE MAMMALS ARE INVOLVED

ABSTRACT Providing rapid and humane care for distressed or threatened marine mammals is crucial to the ultimate success of such actions. Recently, in the southeast United States, marine mammals were observed in the vicinity of several oil spills. Proper coordination of marine mammal rescue or recovery actions with the Unified Command (UC) is essential for response personnel safety and increased probability of saving the affected animals. In the event of animal mortalities, effective coordination between the marine mammal resource agencies and the UC helps ensure the preservation of causal evidence. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration'S (NOAA'S) Office of Response and Restoration (OR&R), generally through the NOAA Scientific Support Coordinator (SSC), is able to assist the Federal On-Scene Coordinator (FOSC) and UC in addressing the threat of spilled oil on potentially affected marine mammals. Response actions during recent spills included: documenting the animals’ type and location, notification of the marine mammal agencies and teams responsible for their recovery and care, and coordination between the spill response and the marine mammal response. The actions of responders during recent spills involving marine mammals are summarized and relevant issues discussed, including properly characterizing the threat to marine mammals from spilled oil. The recent oil spill responses involving marine mammals in the southeastern U.S. are applicable to future spills throughout the United States and potentially worldwide. These recent incidents underscore the need to fully understand and plan for high profile wildlife issues during oil spill responses.

Responder safety and health: Preparing for future disasters

This article reviews lessons learned about managing the safety and health of workers who were involved in disaster response, recovery, and cleanup after the 2001 World Trade Center (WTC) disaster. The first two sections review ongoing responder health burdens and the tragic toll of this disaster from a worker safety and health perspective. The remaining sections address changes in federal infrastructure, response planning, and resources for protection of response and recovery personnel. Proper preparation includes pre-event and "just-in-time" disaster-worker training on likely hazards, organizational assets for hazard monitoring, and hands-on instruction in the use of assigned protective equipment. Good planning includes predeployment medical review to ensure "fitness for duty" and considers the following: (1) personal risk factors, (2) hazards likely to be associated with particular field locations, and (3) risks involved with assigned tasks (eg, workload and pace, work/rest cycles, available resources, and team/supervisory dynamics). Planning also should address worker health surveillance, medical monitoring, and availability of medical care (including mental health services). Disaster safety managers should anticipate likely hazards within planning scenarios and prepare asset inventories to facilitate making timely safety decisions. Disaster safety management begins immediately and provides ongoing real-time guidance to incident leadership at all levels of government. Robust standards must be met to reliably protect workers/responders. An integrated and measurable multiagency safety management function must be built into the incident command system before an incident occurs. This function delineates roles and responsibilities for rapid exposure assessments, ensuring cross-agency consistency in data interpretation, and timely, effective communication of information and control strategies. The ability to perform this safety management function should be tested and evaluated in exercise simulations and drills at multiple levels. Joint planning and exercising of the safety management plan and its function are effective ways to build interagency relationships and to be more systemic in managing logistics for safety equipment and converging personnel. Planning must include mechanisms to enable safety decisions to be implemented-such as effective and rapid scene control (site access), personnel tracking, and safety enforcement. Worker safety and health preparedness and leadership are essential for protecting workers and promoting resiliency among personnel involved in disaster response, recovery, and cleanup.

Transfusion service disaster planning

Abstract The Mayo Clinic, in Rochester, Minnesota, recently set forth a directive to develop a Mayo Emergency Incident Command System (MEICS) plan to respond to major disasters. The MEICS plan that was developed interfaces with national response plans to ensure effective communication and coordination between our institution and local, state, and federal agencies to establish a common language and communication structure. The MEICS plan addresses multiple aspects of dealing with resource needs during a crisis, including the need for blood and transfusion medicine services. The MEICS plan was developed to supplement our current local emergency preparedness procedures and provide a mechanism for responding to the escalating severity of an emergency to deal with situations of a magnitude that is outside the normal experience. A plan was developed to interface the existing Transfusion Medicine disaster plan standard operating procedures (SOP) with the institutional and Department of Laboratory Medicine (DLMP) MEICS plans. The first step in developing this interface was defining MEICS. Other major steps were defining the chain of command, developing a method for visually indicating who is “in charge,” planning communication, defining the actions to be taken, assessing resource needs, developing flowcharts and updating SOPs, and developing a blood rationing team to deal with anticipated blood shortages. Several key features of the interface and updated disaster plan that were developed are calling trees for response personnel, plans for relocating leadership to alternative command centers, and action sheets to assist with resource assessment. The action sheets also provide documentation of key actions by response personnel. Immunohematology 2008;24:93–101.

Simulation-Based Framework for Transportation Network Management in Emergencies

A simulation-based framework for the modeling of transportation network performance under emergency conditions is presented. The system extends the well-established dynamic traffic assignment (DTA) framework and provides the necessary support for the meaningful study of a wide array of evacuation measures, the development of strategies under different prevailing conditions, and the generation of comprehensive emergency response plans. The system can be used to develop libraries to deal with emergencies and unplanned events, train response personnel and traffic management center operators, provide decision support and assistance for the evacuation of residents from affected areas, and ensure unhindered access to first responders. A variety of practical issues relevant to evacuation modeling are discussed, and the modeling framework is demonstrated by using the Boston, Massachusetts, network as an example. DynaMIT, a state-of-the-art DTA model, is used in the case study to illustrate how the benefits of network management strategies might be ascertained. The paper concludes with future directions, including the integration of simulation modeling as a real-time tool for the management of evolving evacuations.

Ancile: Pervasively Shared Situational Awareness

Ancile is a distributed architecture for information sharing that satisfies the needs of tracking personnel and notifies them of events of interest in their vicinity. It was demonstrated to be effective in notifying soldiers to mortar rounds that were already in the air; the soldiers who would have been hit by the rounds had sufficient time to leave the impact area before impact. This article describes extensions to the Ancile architecture that make it significantly more flexible and allow it, for instance, to support notifications to emergency response personnel in times of crisis.

A wavelet-based structural damage assessment approach with progressively downloadedsensor data

This paper presents a wavelet-based on-line damage assessment approach based on theuse of progressively transmitted multi-resolution sensor data. In extreme eventslike strong earthquakes, real-time retrieval of structural monitoring data andon-line damage assessment of civil infrastructures are crucial for emergency reliefand disaster assistance efforts such as resource allocation and evacuation routearrangement. Due to the limited communication bandwidth available to datatransmission during and immediately after major earthquakes, innovative methods forintegrated sensor data transmission and on-line damage assessment are highly desired.The proposed approach utilizes a lifting scheme wavelet transform to generatemulti-resolution sensor data, which are transmitted progressively in increasing resolution.Multi-resolution sensor data enable interactive on-line condition assessment ofstructural damages. To validate this concept, a hysteresis-based damage assessmentmethod, proposed by Iwan for extreme-event use, is selected in this study. Asensitivity study on the hysteresis-based damage assessment method under varyingdata resolution levels was conducted using simulation data from a six-story steelbraced frame building subjected to earthquake ground motion. The results of thisstudy show that the proposed approach is capable of reducing the raw sensordata size by a significant amount while having a minor effect on the accuracy ofhysteresis-based damage assessment. The proposed approach provides a valuable decisionsupport tool for engineers and emergency response personnel who want to access thedata in real time and perform on-line damage assessment in an efficient manner.

Inhibiting the Transport of Hazardous Spores Using Polymer-Based Solutions

A series of polymer solutions were developed for the purpose of immobilizing aerosolized 1–10 μ m sized hazardous biological particles. The polymer solutions were designed as tools for emergency response and remediation personnel. The inhibition of secondary aerosolization and migration of biothreat particles has important implications for public health protection and contamination cleanup. Limiting further dispersion of particles such as Bacillus anthracis spores may reduce inhalation hazards and enhance remediation efficiencies. This study evaluated film-forming polymers that have multiple functional groups capable of attracting and binding particles; these included acrylates, cellulosics, vinyl polymers, and polyurethanes. The selected polymers were combined with appropriate solvents to design solutions that met specific performance objectives. The polymer solutions were then evaluated for key characteristics, such as high adhesion, high elasticity, low density, short drying time, low viscosity, and low surface tension. These solutions were also evaluated for their adhesion to biothreat agent in a series of wind tunnel experiments using highly refined aerosolized Bacillus atrophaeus spores (a simulant for anthrax, 1–3 μ m). Results demonstrated that a polymer solution, an amphoteric acrylate identified as NS-2, was the best candidate for attaching to spores and inhibiting reaerosolization. This polymer solution was anionic, thus providing the electrostatic (coulombic) attraction to cationic spores, had low surface tension, and performed well in wind tunnel tests.

Protecting Transportation Infrastructure

In the context of homeland security, critical infrastructures are those physical and information technology facilities, networks, services and assets which, if disrupted or destroyed, would have a serious impact on the health, safety, security, or economic well-being of citizens or the effective functioning of governments. Transportation infrastructures are a key component of a nation's critical infrastructures, covering physical assets such as airports, ports, and railway and mass transit networks as well as software systems such as traffic control systems. In effect, among various critical infrastructures spanning a range of economic sectors and government operations, transportation is widely viewed as one of the most significant and impactful. A 2002 study concerning the significance of infrastructure components and the consequences of a destructive event rated transportation as extremely significant. Other components at this highest level of significance were communications, power, emergency response personnel and assets, and national security resources.

An operational multiscale system for hazards prediction, mapping, and response

By definition, a crisis is a situation that requires assistance to be managed. Hence, response to a crisis involves the merging of local and non-local emergency response personnel. In this situation, it is critical that each participant: (1) know the roles and responsibilities of each of the other participants; (2) know the capabilities of each of the participants; and (3) have a common basis for action. For many types of natural disasters, this entails having a common operational picture of the unfolding events, including detailed information on the weather, both current and forecasted, that may impact on either the emergency itself or on response activities. The Consequences Assessment Tool Set (CATS) is a comprehensive package of hazard prediction models and casualty and damage assessment tools that provides a linkage between a modeled or observed effect and the attendant consequences for populations, infrastructure, and resources, and, hence, provides the common operational picture for emergency response. The Operational Multiscale Environment model with Grid Adaptivity (OMEGA) is an atmospheric simulation system that links the latest methods in computational fluid dynamics and high-resolution gridding technologies with numerical weather prediction to provide specific weather analysis and forecast capability that can be merged into the geographic information system framework of CATS. This paper documents the problem of emergency response as an end-to-end system and presents the integrated CATS-OMEGA system as a prototype of such a system that has been used successfully in a number of different situations.

Low Frequency Noise in a Paper Mill Control Room

This field study aimed to evaluate the prevalence of annoyance and disturbance and the subjective perception of the sound environment due to noise, in an old and a new control room at a large paper mill. Working in a control room requires sustained attention and concentration and, in the case of error messages, rapid and correct decisions. In this study, the personnel's responses were collected by questionnaire, and detailed sound measurements were taken in both control rooms. The A-weighted sound pressure level in the new control room was 54.9 dB, a reduction from the 63.5 dB measured in the old room, and the C-weighted sound pressure level was 66.8 dB, a reduction from the 75.2 dB measured in the old room. The new control room was rated as being a less noisy environment; however, the personnel did complain about noise from other computers/equipment, radios, and the new laboratory.

The Commandeerer in Chief

As Hurricane Katrina demonstrated, federalism can impede the government's ability to plan for and respond to emergencies. Many emergencies transcend federalist divisions of power and responsibility, rendering unclear which level of government should respond. In addition, while emergencies may require a coordinated response by local, state, and national government, getting different levels of government to work together in times of crises is difficult. Further, even when states and localities call for outside assistance, they tend to resist undue federal interference in their affairs; a national government that lacks experience working with local actors on the ground can find it difficult to implement relief programs. Given the widely recognized failures of the government's response to Katrina and the urgent need for reform, some federal officials have proposed that, in a future emergency, rather than try to work with state and local response personnel, the federal government should simply deploy the military to take over the relief effort. This Article presents an alternative solution: emergency commandeering. This solution would allow the federal government, when it responds to certain kinds of emergencies, to call into periods of mandatory federal service the emergency response personnel of the state in which the emergency occurs, and, if necessary, emergency response personnel from other states. These state employees - police, firefighters, emergency medical technicians, urban search and rescue teams, and public health specialists - would serve with compensation under the command of the President. Emergency commandeering allows the national government to mount an effective response, one that draws upon the skills and experiences of state and local personnel, without the hindrance of multiple command structures or other forms of state and local resistance. Emergency commandeering is authorized by the Constitution, consistent with federalism, and, compared to the alternative of sending the military into our streets, good for democracy.

Swissair Flight 111 Disaster Response Impacts: Lessons Learned From the Voices of Disaster Volunteers

This qualitative research study provides insight into the specific experiences, trauma, and needs of disaster volunteers as an understudied and marginalized sector of response and recovery personnel. Based on a qualitative analysis of in-depth interviews, the authors present the tasks, exposures, impacts, and search for meaning of the Swissair Flight 111 disaster volunteers who were exposed to human remains during response and recovery efforts. The article is structured to amplify the voices of volunteers to reveal the specificity of disaster fieldwork and resultant multilevel impacts critical to understanding and responding to contemporary disasters. The article concludes with a discussion of the need for clinical and operational policies and protocols that acknowledge the risk and impact of volunteer exposure to human remains and serve to protect the well-being of future volunteer disaster response and recovery workers.

Decision support for local environmental impact assessment

Sustainability has become a key concern for consumers and industry. However, coming to understand its implications in the context of daily life can be difficult. It may be hard to come to terms with the idea that traditional activities present environmental risks and may lead to real emergencies, manifested differently depending on local conditions. Everyone will be asked to do more but the move towards sustainability may require the total transformation of current attitudes and actions. This paper considers the role of informatics in responding to, and possibly averting, environmental emergencies by making information available to decision makers, whether they are individual consumers, institutional buyers, or emergency response personnel. If all choices can be presented within a spectrum of best and worst possible impacts for sustainability, decision makers can meaningfully weigh their options. Any evaluation on this basis is presently very difficult because one needs to independently assess and integrate possibly incomplete and conflicting information from a wide variety of sources. This paper describes the use of the cogito software, which embodies an approach for data access and presentation that is expected to provide significant benefits over existing web-based tools. The paper also considers the issues related to the collection and synthesis of disparate data.

Communication, Coherence, and Collective Action

Communications infrastructure is critical to managing the complex, dynamic operations that evolve in disaster environments. The impact of Hurricane Katrina destroyed the communications infrastructure within the New Orleans metropolitan region, leaving emergency response personnel and the public with little capacity to exchange information vital for coordinating response actions. The loss of communications proved especially damaging, given the size of the geographic region and the number of people affected. The authors used content analysis of news reports to identify the network of organizations that emerged in response to Hurricane Katrina, and network analysis to examine patterns of interaction among the organizations. The patterns reveal significant asymmetry in information among organizations at different levels of authority and responsibility in the disaster response system, a condition that contributed to the collapse of coordination in disaster operations. Conversely, well-designed communications and information infrastructure can contribute significantly to the resilience of communities exposed to recurring risk.

Designing gaming simulations for the assessment of group decision support systems in emergency response

In very low-frequency, high-consequence events such as earthquakes or those resulting from malfunctions at commercial nuclear power generating facilities, a group or individual’s prior experience with crisis events will certainly influence judgments and behavior. Written plans and procedures have been shown to serve valuable purposes in training new organizations, individuals, and public officials for responding to these events. It has been demonstrated repeatedly that when emergency operations are conducted in accordance with existing plans, reaction time is reduced and coordination is improved, with fewer casualties and reduced economic damage as results. Such plans and procedures provide a normative model for simulation scenarios in the context of education and training activities. Simulations can also provide a field laboratory for evaluation of new technologies for training in operational decision-making. The purpose of this paper is to report on the design and use of a gaming simulation as a means of assessing one group decision support system (GDSS) for emergency response. The paper reviews related past work and focuses on our recent experience in conducting quasi-experiments to assess Emergency Management imPROViser (EMPROV), a GDSS for improvisation in emergency response operations. The process of designing a gaming simulation, determining the experimental protocol and coordinating the gaming sessions with emergency response personnel from the Port of Rotterdam will be described. Finally, the paper concludes with suggestions on how to improve the benefit of gaming simulations for training and operations.

The use of rapid diagnostic kits for the rapid presumptive identification of bioterrorist agents

The events of 11 September 2001 and the subsequent US anthrax mail attacks placed enormous pressure on emergency response agencies to be able to rapidly assess the potential risk of an incident as a possible case of bioterrorism. In response to this perceived need to rapidly identify bioterrorist agents in the field, a number of hand-held ?tickets? appeared in the market and were promoted heavily to emergency response personnel. These included products from Tetracore (Guardian Bio-Threat Alert System), Alexis, Sigma-Aldrich (BADD ? Biowarfare Agent Detection Device) and RAMP. This brief discussion will examine the current knowledge on such devices and their applications for the detection of bioterrorist agents.

Identification and Evaluation of Mental Health and Psychosocial Preparedness Resources From the Centers for Public Health Preparedness

An exemplar group of disaster mental health subject matter experts was formed as part of the CDC Center for Public Health Preparedness program to develop a "toolkit" of relevant CPHP disaster mental health training and education curricula and resources. The group developed a charter, compiled relevant CPHP training materials, developed an objective review template, and collectively reviewed the assembled resources. Curricular reviews were presented at a March 2005 meeting where an asset matrix was developed to categorize and compare the training and education curricula and resources. This article describes findings and next steps for toolkit development and refinement. Some recommendations for the toolkit identified thus far are to develop standardized disaster mental health nomenclature, add training exercises to the array of CPHP training and education resources, develop disaster mental health competencies for public health workers, add more advanced trainings to the current repertoire, and add resources to the toolkit during the coming years. The group also plans to disseminate the mental health/psychosocial preparedness toolkit to practice partners engaged in training disaster response personnel.

Size Isn't Everything: The Effects of Size and Brightness of Retroreflective Materials on Nighttime Conspicuity

To increase their level of conspicuity, emergency response personnel wear Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) with retroreflective materials. That is, retroreflective materials increase the probability that oncoming motorists will see them. The goal of the current study was to provide empirical evidence regarding the relative nighttime conspicuity of conventional-trim retroreflective patterned garments (which have retroreflective material concentrated on specific portions of the garment) and area-retroreflective patterned garments (which have retroreflective material distributed evenly across the surface area of the garments). The question of interest was whether trim and area-reflective garments that reflect the same amount of light (i.e., equal RI values) provide equivalent conspicuity. At night, subjects seated in the passenger seat of cars approaching a live simulated roadway accident scene attempted to detect and recognize a human form in the road. Across three different levels of RI, the results demonstrate that when area reflective and trim garments reflect the same overall amount of light, area reflective garments provide lower levels of conspicuity than do conventional trim garments. These results suggest that, under the conditions of the current study, the brightness per unit area of retroreflective material needs to be considered rather than simply considering the total brightness of the garment independent of the size of the retroreflective surface-area.