GIS-Based Decision Support Tools to Plan for and Respond to Radiological Incidents Across the Response Timeline
Citation:
Lemieux, P., T. Boe, K. Ratliff, A. Mikelonis, AND C. Hayes. GIS-Based Decision Support Tools to Plan for and Respond to Radiological Incidents Across the Response Timeline. In Proceedings, WM2021 Conference, Phoenix, AZ, March 08 - 12, 2021. WM Symposia, Inc., TEMPE, AZ, 21052, (2021).
Impact/Purpose:
This paper will introduce a hypothetical contamination scenario and explain how these tools could be used in conjunction with each other to assess the outdoor movement of radiological contaminants with respect to time, showing examples of how this knowledge can be used by the decision-makers to maintain situational awareness of a changing situation and enable them to adjust operations based on the changes.
Description:
Management of waste from wide-area radiological incidents will be complicated by several major issues: 1) the potentially enormous quantities of solid and aqueous waste, lightly contaminated with one or more radionuclides, that will need to be properly managed; 2) the profound impact that decontamination/demolition strategies will have on the quantity and characteristics of the waste; and 3) the movement of contamination from its initial point of deposition, due to precipitation, vehicular movement, decontamination activities and other human activities. These issues present decision-makers with challenges that follow the incident from the point of pre-incident planning, through the incident itself, and during the longer-term cleanup and monitoring operations. EPA has been working on the development of decision support tools to aid decision-makers’ ability to manage the various complexities of a wide-area response using a system-of-systems approach, where decisions are coupled. These tools utilize Geographic Information System (GIS) approaches to develop decontamination strategies based on publicly available infrastructure data within the US and an adaptation of EPA’s Stormwater Management Model (SWMM) to model the spread of radionuclides over time as a result of precipitation events. This paper will focus on the application of two tools to support decision makers’ needs during such an incident.
