Rapid Risk Assessment: FY05 Annual Summary Report

The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) is developing decision support tools that will assist in the transition of incident information into Protective Action Recommendations (PARs) that are understandable and can be executed in a real-world, operational environment. During emergencies, responders must rapidly assess risks and decide on the best course of action—all within minutes to hours. PNNL is blending existing modeling and decision support technology to develop new methods for transitioning science-based threat assessment to PARs. The rapid risk assessment tool will be both understandable and applicable to the emergency management community and would be a valuable tool during any water security-related incident. In 2005, PNNL demonstrated the integration of the multi-thematic modeling with emergency management decision support tools to create a Rapid Risk Assessment (RRA) tool that will transition risk to PARs that assist in responding to or mitigating the direct and indirect impacts of the incident(s). The RRA tool does this by aligning multi-thematic modeling capabilities with real-world response zones established by emergency and site operations managers. The RRA tool uses the risk assessment tool to drive prognostic models that use the type of incident, time of impact, severity of impact, and duration of impact to select the most appropriate PAR. Because PARs (and the thresholds by which they are selected) are jointly established by the technologists and the emergency management and operations decision makers, the science-based risk assessment can transition into a recommendation that can be understood and executed by people in the field