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Case Studies: Estimation of Waste and Debris Following a Large-Scale Natural Disaster
Citation:
Lemieux, P. AND T. Boe. Case Studies: Estimation of Waste and Debris Following a Large-Scale Natural Disaster. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Washington, DC, EPA/600/R-22/260, 2022.
Impact/Purpose:
This report contains several case studies presenting waste estimates from hypothetical scenarios involving natural disasters. It is hoped that these case studies provide decision makers at the local, state, territorial, tribal, and federal levels with information that could be used to help generate pre-incident response and recovery planning documents, including disaster debris management plans, to facilitate material and waste management after a disaster.
Description:
Waste and debris management presents considerable challenges during any large-scale disaster; additional challenges will exist during a wide-area chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear (CBRN) incident. Waste is a broad-based term that refers to all materials generated as a result of an incident that require management via reuse, recycling, recovery, treatment, and disposal. Debris is a narrower term generally referring to materials that were generated as a result of an incident but are typically commingled in a complex mixture that frequently inhibits some of the waste minimization approaches that can be done with materials that are easily segregated. Many emergency planners do not have sufficient time or resources to allow them to effectively plan for low-probability, high-impact incidents. The purpose of this document is to develop a set of scalable case studies of various types of scenarios that could be utilized by communities to develop an initial estimate of debris and waste quantities and types that would be suitable for use in pre-incident planning documents, including disaster debris management plans, noting that planning for natural disasters can be largely applied to planning for manmade disasters. The inventories that are presented are accompanied by Excel workbooks that can allow the user to linearly scale the estimates to better suit their planning scenarios, based on estimates of destruction, changing the affected areas, or by changing the number of affected populations. These case studies should facilitate development of pre-incident waste management plans by relieving emergency planners from the task of developing a hypothetical estimate of debris upon which they could base their decision-making in planning documents. The programmatic objective of this case study is to develop a scalable estimate of the waste and debris that would be generated by several types of hypothetical natural disasters. The natural disasters to be addressed in this case study development include: - A Category 4-5 hurricane at a coastal urban center; - A magnitude 7-8 earthquake followed by a tsunami at an urban center; and - An EF4 tornado at an inland, small metropolitan community. The estimates will either be based on documentation from previous exercises, based on modeling results supplied by or acquired by the Principal Investigator (PI), or based on discussions with various Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) and manually drawn using Esri’s ArcGIS software. Affected infrastructure will be generally based on FEMA’s Hazus infrastructure databases, although if a custom infrastructure data set is available for the hypothetical community, then those data are used for quantifying infrastructure rather than the Hazus data. Estimates of waste, debris, and other materials will be developed that would result from the disaster and associated response and recovery operations. Estimates of destruction of the affected infrastructure will be inputted as a “fraction destroyed” user-adjustable parameter. Waste estimates will be evaluated based on type of waste/debris, potential for management as conventional solid waste, and potential for recycling/reuse.