Disaster modeling in New York

Citation

(2010), "Disaster modeling in New York", Disaster Prevention and Management, Vol. 19 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/dpm.2010.07319aab.002

Disaster modeling in New York

Article Type: News items From: Disaster Prevention and Management, Volume 19, Issue 1

A large-scale computer simulation of disasters in New York City called Plan C may help hospitals and emergency responders anticipate casualties and stressors on the health care system.

Devised by an interdisciplinary team of doctors, computer specialists and social scientists, Plan C was recently run on a simulated sarin gas attack at different locations in Manhattan. The scenario was based on the actual sarin gas attacks that occurred in Japan in 1994 and 1995.

“With the input of city demographic information, hospital resource and public transit data, the results showed that under certain circumstances, up to 22,000 individuals might become exposed, leading to 178 intensive care unit admissions”, the simulation found. According to lead author New York University Dr Silas Smith, MD, “In terms of creating the model, we wanted to start with a point source release … This allowed us to model a smaller population, so we were able to keep track of every single individual agent’s movement on a minute-by-minute basis. We ran it 100 times for two days. We wanted to have a defined population and defined area of release.”

Developed by researchers at NYU, “Plan C is an innovative tool for emergency managers, urban planners, and public health officials to prepare and evaluate optimal plans for response to an array of hypothetical urban catastrophic situations”, according to a news release.

But while the Sarin attack was the most recent scenario run by the group, Smith says that they are next planning to model a pandemic flu outbreak. In the future, they hope to expand the model to deal with impacts from environmental disasters like a hurricane hitting New York.

“We would like to be able to translate this to that kind of scenario”, Smith says. “The underlying technology could probably do it, covering environmental scenarios, the tidal zones or ‘slosh’ zones affecting New York, especially if we can incorporate other models like HAZUS that FEMA provides. Once you have an idea of the affected population, you could set a model like this up to see what would happen, where those affected populations might go. The trick would be – as in any model – in selecting the parameters.”

While the current simulation was set in New York, Smith says his group demonstrated the model was portable for at least several other cities, including Philadelphia, Boston, and San Francisco.

“Models all have limitations”, he says, “and we tried to provide some of the obvious and less obvious limitations to our own model. We put together a multidisciplinary team of computer scientists, doctors, and sociologists because the perspective of everyone is particularly important. We thought it was necessary to create a model with perspective.”

The paper, “A Novel Approach to Multihazard Modeling and Simulation”, appears in the June 2009 issue of Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness. More information about Plan C can be found at www.nyu.edu/ccpr/laser/plancinfo.html

(Abstracted from Natural Hazards Observer, September 2009)