In fact, they are very pleased with a new federal/local partnership just launched, that will give the Seattle Fire Department, Emergency Response Center, HazMat Mobile Command Center and others access to federal resources in the event of chemical, biological and radiological threats.
The project, the "Local Integration of National Atmospheric Release Advisory Center" (LINC) will eventually provide continuous operation of an integrated nationwide system for all levels of government.
Partners in the project include Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, The federal Department of Energy's NARAC, and Public Technology Inc., in a pilot of a Web-based system of predictive modeling in the event of a chemical, biological or radiological release.
Livermore Lab's computers can crunch data on weather, wind and the nature of the released material, to predict the path and dispersion rate of the agent, locate high-risk areas in the predicted path, and inform first responders of possible effects on health.
The pilot is just getting started, and presenters at the PTI annual conference in Scottsdale last week talked about some of the project features. Timothy Croll, community services director for Seattle Public Utilities, said that the approach makes sense from a local perspective. The federal government, he said, isn't going to hire tens of thousands of employees to handle first response.
"They are going to use our firefighters so all the high-tech stuff and coordination and communication and research at the federal level will be made available and leveraged with local resources," he said. "And they come and talk to local jurisdictions first rather than have it trickle down. We think that's a very positive step, which augurs well for the success of the program."
CAMEO
Local governments have dealt with hazardous materials for years, and the idea is to leverage and extend local technologies and information. One local tool in Seattle is CAMEO, computer-aided management of emergency operations, developed in 1986 through an earlier federal-local partnership between the Seattle Fire Department and NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. CAMEO was originally built on a Macintosh platform, but now runs on both Mac and PC, and Seattle has it running on PC laptops.
CAMEO contains a database of chemicals and their appearance and properties. Within the CAMEO system are detailed graphics of the local city or community, with roads, schools, police and fire stations, hospitals, etc. In the event of an industrial chemical release from, for example, a fire at a swimming pool chemical supply store, CAMEO can plot the windspeed, direction and chemical dispersion rate so that downwind residents can be warned or evacuated.
Croll says that while CAMEO has a deluxe front end and a lot of information about the effects of industrial chemicals. NARAC comes from a radiological background, and developed more expertise on chemical and biological releases, and the project may blend the two systems.
"Our HazMat unit right now has CAMEO on it," said Croll, "so they may be at an incident first and do a quick dispersion model with CAMEO. Maybe we'll be able to work out a link where the inputs into CAMEO will get transferred to the Livermore program for a more detailed predictive model hours into the future."
Croll said that there's a tradition in Seattle of taking the best technology that's available and incorporating it into emergency and other types of operations. One of the unexpected benefits of the project, he said, is a new awareness of how much detailed meteorological data was available.
"More dense meteorological data can help our modeling and make the difference between life and death," he said, adding that the most exciting thing will be to see all this data in a hand-held unit carried by a first responder in the field.
