Consequences Assessment Tool Set (CATS)

Overview

CATS assesses the consequences of technological disasters on population, resources, and infrastructure. CATS analyzes the damage to the environment, the risk to the well-being of the exposed population, and provides real-time resource allocation information to mitigate the consequences.

Application

Developed under the guidance of the U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), CATS provides significant assistance in emergency managers' training, exercises, contingency planning, logistical planning, and calculating requirements for humanitarian aid.

Hazards accounted for in CATS range from industrial accidents to terrorism to acts of war.

CATS can been used to identify:

• Roadblock distributions and editing
• Population and infrastructure at risk
• Atmospheric plume footprints
• Locations and resources for disaster recovery
• Blast effects
• Road network building and routing
• Addresses and locations
• Best and regional weather

Features

The current version of CATS sponsored by DTRA includes:

• A high explosive (HE) model
• The Emergency Response Guide (ERG-2008) phenomenology to predict keep-out zones from hazardous chemical spills
• The NOAA ALOHA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Areal Locations of Hazardous Atmospheres) model for chemical releases
• Import of natural hazard (earthquakes, hurricanes, floods) damage files from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) HAZUS model
• Import of hazard plume data from the DTRA HPAC atmospheric dispersion model and the Joint Effects Model (JEM)
• User specified damage areas and assets

A sister program, Incident Command Tool for Drinking Water (ICWater), is is available in conjunction with CATS. It generates downstream and upstream traces of the release of CBRN materials in rivers using the RiverSpill model.

Benefits

CATS emphasizes the calculation and analysis of consequences, not merely the display of hazard distributions. It contains models for converting spatial and temporal distributions into probabilities of casualties. These probabilities can be created for diverse exposure scenarios, including time-varying protective measures.

CATS also identifies and locates resources required for an effective, sustained response and recommends the most effective roadblock distribution and routing to prevent unauthorized access to the affected area.

SAIC offers support services for CATS, including training, customization, and integration with other data sources.

Technical Specifications

The architectural framework in CATS relies on the Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI®) Geographic Information System (GIS) and various interface modules have been created to enable the seamless and transparent communication of the software components with the common GIS map background and with the databases. The collection of these models, their specialized interfaces, and various assets allocation and report generation software comprise the tool sets in CATS. CATS can operate either as an extension to the ArcGIS® desktop or as a stand-alone code using the ArcEngine runtime libraries.

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