Consequences Assessment Tool Set (CATS)

Overview

The Consequences Assessment Tool Set (CATS) assesses the consequences of technological and natural disasters to population, resources and infrastructure. Hazards accounted for in CATS range from natural disasters such as hurricanes and earthquakes, to technological disasters such as industrial accidents, terrorism and acts of war.

Applications

A user-friendly software package for the PC, Windows 2000 and XP, CATS combines state-of-the-art hazard and consequence prediction, digital databases and a Geographic Information System (GIS) within an easy-to-learn Graphical User Interface (GUI). Developed under the guidance of the US Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) and the US Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), CATS provides significant assistance in emergency managers' training, exercises, contingency planning, logistical planning and calculating requirements for humanitarian aid.

Features

CATS predicts the damage and assesses the consequences associated with that damage as a result of a technological or natural hazard. See photo. The technological portion of CATS provides for the calculation of damage and consequence using real-time weather and a variety of sources, particularly those associated with weapons of mass destruction (WMD), as employed by military forces or terrorists. User-friendly GUIs and pre-defined event scenarios assist the CATS user in predicting credible hazards resulting from the dispersal of radiological, biological and chemical agents, regardless of the user's level of expertise and access to information. See screen shot.

The natural hazard portion of CATS provides for the calculation of damage and consequence from earthquakes and hurricanes. The earthquake model is a collection of programs that models the severity and the geographical extent of the damage due to the primary earthquake hazard of ground shaking as well as to the collateral hazards of ground failure, tsunami, and fire following the earthquake. The consequence of a damaging earthquake is assessed in terms of the facilities, infrastructure, and population at risk. The hurricane model predicts the tracking of the storm and the damage to the areas surrounding the track of the hurricane caused by the wind. See screen shot of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, just hours before landfall. The model ingests hurricane observation and forecast data provided by the National Hurricane Center (NHC) in Miami, FL, the Central Pacific Hurricane Center (CPHC) in Honolulu, HI, or the Joint Typhoon Warning Center (JTWC) in Guam in the form of Marine Forecast/Advisory Messages.

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 to prevent unauthorized access to the affected area. See screen shot.

CATS operates within a full featured GIS. This means that the GIS acts as an operating system for the CATS application. The GIS environment allows the user to do far more than merely display graphical representations of hazard footprints on map backgrounds. Rather, CATS analytical tools enable the user to combine multiple layers of information, hazards, casualty probabilities and populations to determine total number of people at risk, as well as levels and extent of property damage and event impact on the infrastructure. It provides the flexibility to incorporate a wide range of user-specific, geo-referenced and attributed, infrastructure, resource and facility databases, all within the spatial context of geo-referenced vector, raster and photographic images.

Developed for the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), CATS is now available to Federal, State, and local government emergency response organizations nationwide.