48 “You could have the best plans in the entire world, but you can’t control everything. Being adaptable on the fly but controlling the things you can prior to that—this tool does that.” — Brian Payne, Director, Emergency Management Agency, Scott County, Iowa Preparing for a Nuclear Radiation Emergency Following the partial meltdown at a nuclear reactor on Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in 1979, FEMA was put in charge of leading off-site emergency planning and preparedness activities in the case of a radiological event. The work often involves plume modeling to determine the distance that radioactivity may travel. Knowing the location and trajectory of radiation clouds influences evacuation zones and helps multiple agencies coordinate their response. Before developing its new Situational Awareness Experience application for emergency preparedness exercises, Scott County relied on a web app that was helpful, but it did not connect to other information essential for a radiological exercise. For example, health department officials would need information about vulnerable populations. Law enforcement would need to see road closures and safety perimeters. A county executive would need to see the evacuation areas and gauge the evacuation rate to determine who should shelter in place. Hunting down necessary information became a timeconsuming challenge, particularly for Scott County’s three-person GIS team: Ray Weiser, Darrell Inskeep, and Breanna Pairrett. Invariably, during the simulation of a radiological emergency, the GIS team would be busy editing and updating data, and somebody would ask for a list or a data export. The team needed a way to display information that others in the Emergency Operations Center (EOC) wanted to see. Pairrett was hired in mid-2023 as a dedicated GIS analyst for the Emergency Management Agency. In November, she worked with Inskeep and Weiser to expand the county’s tool. They wanted to feature more statistics, more numbers. “We like maps, and we know how to read them, but not everybody does,” Pairrett said. “We needed something that we could also interact with more and add data quickly to. It would be a much more pleasant experience for everyone, and we [could] get information relayed to other people within the EOC during any kind of event.” With input from Payne and others on his team, including Molly McKee and Jim Hawkes, the GIS team developed a tool that would display all the information in one place. In the EOC, the information was displayed on multiple screens. “People were up by those TV screens, writing stuff down or pointing at it, talking to their individual teams,” Pairrett said. “We might have gotten asked a couple questions, I can’t even really remember. It worked so smoothly.” Officials with Scott County emergency management simulate their response during a nuclear radiation exercise, displaying GIS dashboards and maps on screen.
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