Author: James S. Christian
Date: July/August 1989
Keywords: chemical environment fire emergency health
Text: (Editor's Note: James Christian graduated from HSU with a bachelor of arts in geography in 1975. He is a fire captain for the city of Eureka. Any questions may be directed to him at445-0294.) The city is Seattle. A liquid chemical tanker truck collides with a passenger car on Interstate 5 and overturns, spilling part of its load. Spilled cargo ignites almost immediately, creating an enormous column of black, toxic smoke. All four dispatch consoles in the Seattle Fire Department Emergency Communications Center beneath the Space needle are inundated with frantic calls from citizens in the vicinity of the accident. The dispatcher sends a full first alarm assignment of engines, trucks, chief officers and the HazMat response team from Station No.10. CAMEO is on its way. CAMEO, or Computer Aided Management of Emergency Operations, is a very complex program that runs on Macintosh Plus, SE and II computers. It is specifically designed to meet the needs of emergency responders to hazardous materials incidents and can be run from a response vehicle at the site. There are thousands of chemicals stored, used and transported in the United States today. Many of those chemicals are extremely toxic or thermally unstable, and there is simply no way that an incident commander at a chemical incident can readily identify the chemical(s) involved, or hope to be able to remember the proper action to take for each possible scenario. The proper action to take with a fire involving sodium amide, for example, will result in detonation if used at an incident involving metallic sodium. CAMEO is a product of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Hazardous Materials Response Branch. It assists emergency planners and first responders in planning for and safely handling chemical accidents. When CAMEO first came out, it ran under Business Filevision. CAMEO II, the version now in use, runs on Hypercard. To give you an idea of the complexity of the program and of the problem, you should know that CAMEO requires a minimum of 11 megabytes of free space on your hard disk! More memory is required as the program is customized for your area. As the NOAA documentation overview states, "CAMEO II contains response information and recommendations for 2,629 commonly transported chemicals; an air dispersion model to assist in evaluating release scenarios and evacuation options; and several easily adaptable databases and computational programs that address the emergency planning provisions of Title III, the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act of 1986" (Superfund Amendments and Reauthorization Act; SARA Title III). CAMEO's main screen is called the Navigator, and from it you can access records and files of known chemicals in your jurisdiction, industrial site plans, local maps, population hazard data, planning data, response information, an air dispersion model and the chemical database. The chemical database is further enhanced by CAMEO's Codebreaker. With Codebreaker, a user can make an educated guess as to the identity of an unknown chemical by searching the database with incomplete and fragmented information such as a partial trade name, U.N. number, Standard Transportation Commodity Code, Registry of Toxic Effects of Chemical accession number, or synonym. (The United Nations designation is an international identification scheme using four-digit numbers to identify hazardous materials.) From Codebreaker, the user can access CAMEO's Response Information Data Sheets, which make up a Hypercard stack of hazards, response information and properties for each listed substance. CAMEO allows each jurisdiction to create a stack of local maps with common draw programs that can be used for plotting developments in a major incident. A map showing the incident location is then used in conjunction with the ALOHA air model built into the program. ALOHA is an acronym for Area Locations of Hazardous Atmospheres. The air model will compute the dispersion of an atmospheric release from the source, using weather conditions from a radio-controlled atmospheric station linked to the computer or typed in manually. The ALOHA program creates a series of "Gaussian" distributions to generate a graphic that predicts the path of the plume of hazardous fumes as it is carried downwind. The air model uses its own chemical library, known as Chemlib, for its calculations. The ability to predict dispersal patterns is vitally important for evacuation and warning plans. If you think about it, the amount of work that went into the CAMEO project is astounding. The documentation binder is almost four inches thick. NOAA maintains a CAMEO bulletin board and is constantly soliciting input to refine the program. CAMEO is a very specialized program, but one that could virtually mean the difference between life and death for many people. This is one case where the taxpayers are really getting their money's worth. CAMEO is free to agencies that have responsibilities for the control of hazardous materials incidents. In addition to Seattle, several fire departments and response agencies across the country have placed CAMEO into service on their Hazardous Materials Response Teams. Like any tool used in a complex endeavor, CAMEO will not solve every HazMat problem. It does, however, give the first responder and/or incident commander a wealth of information upon which to base sound tactical decisions and perhaps save communities from disaster. The Eureka Fire Department does not own CAMEO, but it does have access to the program through the city fire marshal. Funding for purchase of a Macintosh to run the program is anticipated in the next year or two.
Copyright © July/August 1989 by James S. Christian