Releases from hazmat incidents and large urban fires present a significant hazard to downwind communities. Understanding off-site consequences from these events is key to ensuring prompt and effective community warnings, appropriate response strategies, as well as ensuring support of external agencies and stake holders.

While plume modelling has the ability to answer the important questions of where is the hazard going, when is it going to get there and in what concentration, current capabilities lack the ability to provide the information in a timely manner. Decisions such as whether to evacuate or shelter in place, must be made quickly in order to be effective and recent incidents have demonstrated that community expectations for information and warnings are increasing.

Now, the development of new plume modelling technologies and delivery systems not only provide responders with rapid access to detailed, more accurate modelling, but also have the ability to provide fully automated weather based incident forecasting, available on turnout. Responders are safer as they can better establish exclusion zones and safe routes of entry before arrival, while potentially impacted communities are quickly identified thus cutting the warning delivery time gap that currently exists.

In addition, by leveraging model results against GIS data, highly informative reports can be generated, providing information on demographics, “at risk” communities and critical infrastructure. Within a few minutes, emergency managers can now have access to the information needed to effectively understand the off-site consequences.

Utilisation of these systems are not only limited to the traditional response role, but are now also providing valuable input to the planning and recovery phases of incidents . From an all agencies perspective, the ability to rapidly provide such detailed level information to other agencies is a significant improvement to providing coordinated incident response.