Leveraging Stormwater Modeling to Prepare for Radiological Emergencies

Over the last three years the United States Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Homeland Security Research Program has published several stormwater modeling papers and held two virtual workshops exploring the interplay between stormwater modeling and EPA’s protective action guidelines for radiological emergencies (e.g., evacuation and relocation guidance). These papers and workshops included case studies using stormwater models in Detroit, Michigan, Buffalo, New York, and a U.S. Coast Guard Base in North Carolina. The program has also been working on the development of a Stormwater Emergency Response Tool and Optimizer (SERTO) to leverage EPA’s Storm Water Management Model (SWMM) to plan sensor detection networks prior to a radiological emergency. In addition to providing sensor placement optimization, there are plans for SERTO to include analysis tools to select most frequent weather events, a multi-objective optimization module, an ensemble manager for the collection of SWMM input files necessary to run these algorithms, and visualization support. This presentation will provide a broad overview of the published modeling case studies’ key findings and preview the workflow for SERTO.