Cosmo Caterino (EPA)Exercise Director

EPA New England Region One Blister Agent

Tabletop Exercise Overview

Implementation of recommendation included in the 2008 New England Homeland Security Environmental Summit After Action Report (AAR).

ERLN lab exercise held last week. The overall goal of the tabletop was to provide

an opportunity to discuss recovery issues that would result after an incident of this type and magnitude.

This discussion assumed that it was 60 Hours post-incident.

Exercise Overview

Exercise the operational relationships among State and Federal partners in accordance with the Regional Contingency Plan (RCP).

Clarify State responsibilities versus Federal responsibilities for a blister agent incident.

Discuss and identify issues related to the decontamination of public and private property and recommend steps towards resolution.

Identify a communications strategy including protective action information to the public regarding a blister agent.

Exercise Objectives

All participants were pre-selected to join one of the following three breakout groups:

Environmental and Public Health Operational Decision-Making

Communicating Information and Protective Actions to the Public

Strategic Decision-Making

Break-Out Groups

Need for ESF-15 Training Establish interagency crisis communications

work group (joint plan) Obtain procedure for developing a single

website Ownership of ESF-15 work group

Analysis of Capabilities / Breakout Group Issue Identification

Need strategy for the management of the public’s and the political leadership’s expectations of limited laboratory capacity

Need unified cleanup goals for an incident of this type and magnitude (long term chronic suface #s)

Need procedure/ interagency plan for sharing data. Need a strategy for developing triage information

that can be communicated to the public Develop a plan to leverage collected patient data

(and its corresponding geographic content) to aid the extent of contamination determination

Analysis of Capabilities / Breakout Group Issue Identification

Need to develop a pre-identified organizational structure relating ESF-10 (and the RRT) to the JFO/RRCC that is consistent with NIMS and the NRF

Need long-term health-based levels that are applicable to sensitive populations for CWA

Need to improve (i.e., lower) laboratory analysis detection capabilities for chemical warfare agents

Need to increase the capacity for analyzing CWA samples (both in the laboratory and using hand-held devices in the field)

Need a predefined interagency data management plan/protocol

Need the lifecycle of an environmental sample posted on the EPA website

Analysis of Capabilities / Breakout Group Issue Identification

Other Suggestions

Share the information from the exercise with your peers

Reach out to laboratories, public health, emergency management agencies

Both Strategic Decision and Environmental breakouts emphasized need to work with public affairs

Support the AAR/Improvement Plan

QUESTIONS?