Question

Scenario:

You are a Sheriff in a rural community. You receive a dispatch that there has been a chemical tanker truck accident and two other vehicles are involved. You send a dispatch out calling for all Deputies to meet you at the scene.

You drive out to the scene, not knowing what to expect, and arrive to mass carnage. You are first on the scene, and therefore the Incident Commander, and an initial survey of the scene is something only nightmares are made of: A chemical tanker trunk is jack-knifed with the cab resting on the ground, yet the tanker is on top of a car and there is unknown liquid chemicals pouring onto the vehicle. There is another vehicle, approximately fifteen (15) feet away from the chemical tanker truck, that is upside down and is smoking…and you are looking at it when a fire breaks out in the engine. You can see that there are two adults, and two children, trapped in the car under the chemical truck’s tanker, and all of them are moving (so they are alive). The liquid chemicals are slowly pouring down the car and, due to the incline of the road, are slowly pooling on the road and slowly moving towards the vehicle that is upside down (with the engine on fire).

Three Deputies arrive and approach you for commands. You try to speak, yet can only point to the chemical tanker truck and the car trapped under it. You throw up and cannot concentrate. The three Deputies start talking and you get your bearings. You cannot tell what type of chemical symbols are on the tanker, so you cannot determine what the leaking liquid is. However, you can tell that the family is alive, in a panic, and need rescue. You cannot wait for a HazMat team to arrive- the trapped people will be dead by then.

You then try to speak to the three Deputies again, yet nothing comes out. You smack yourself in the face, come to reality, and tell the deputies,

“Deputy 1- go over to the car trapped under the tanker and try to get the people out. Deputy 2- call for the fire department and EMS. Deputy 3- go check to see if the driver of the tanker truck is alive!”

Deputy 2 runs off to his patrol vehicle.

Deputy 1 replies, “Sheriff, are you sure? Shouldn’t we wait for a HazMat team?”

“Yeah, we should” said Deputy 3.

You reply, “Well, maybe you are right. We don’t know what type of liquid that is.”

“…but those people are going to die! They are trapped. I am with you, Sheriff, forget HazMat!” exclaimed Deputy 1.

You reply, “Okay- let’s put this to a vote. Raise your hand if you think that we should wait for a HazMat team.”

Only Deputy 3 raised his hand.

“Well, it’s settled!” you say. “Let’s go save them!”

Deputy 3 runs back to you right after Deputy 1 and Deputy 2 run off to execute your orders. Deputy 3 says, “Okay Sheriff, rescue is on the way, yet they are about twenty (2) minutes from arriving. What do you want me to do?”

You are stuck staring at the people trapped in the car and Deputy 1 running over to it.

“Sheriff? SHERIFF!”

You snap out of it and reply, “Sorry- uh, go over to the over-turned vehicle and see if anyone is alive in there.”

“No, wait!” you exclaim as you change your mind. “Stay right here and wait for the fire department and EMS.”

Deputy 1 gets to the car and opens the passenger-side door easily. He pulls a woman out who looks oddly familiar. It is the mother of Deputy 1’s child!

“She’s alive!!!” screams Deputy 1. “My beautiful baby momma is alive!!!!”

Deputy 1 is obviously in a panic. He throws her over his shoulder and starts walking back towards you. Right as he walks by the over-turned vehicle, the vehicle’s engine explodes and the blast throws Deputy 1, and his child’s mother, six feet away to the ground. She landed on top of him. He lays there for two minutes trying to regain his composure.

Deputy 1 crawls out from under her and realizes why he didn’t suffer any damage from the blast: He was shielded from the blast by her body, and she suffered a fatal injury where a chunk of the engine cut her carotid artery wide-open; she had already bled-out and was dead.

“No!!!!” Screams Deputy 1. He is sobbing uncontrollably and hunched over her body.

You take command! “Deputy 2- go help Deputy 1!”

Deputy 2 runs over to assist Deputy 1.

Meanwhile, you run over to check on Deputy 3. He is in the cab of the chemical truck close to the driver- who is still alive! You quickly assess that the driver had been tossed around the cab, during the accident, and had landed on the gear shifter. The driver is facing downwards and impaled on the gear shift.

“Sheriff, I checked it out and the gear shifter went perfectly into the center of the breastbone. We need to get him out of here after that explosion- I am sure the fire and chemicals have been spread around” says Deputy 3.

You look around the outside of the cab and over to the over-turned vehicle that exploded. There is no fire near the cab of the truck, nor chemicals that you can see, so you look over to Deputy 3 and say, “Let’s get him out!”

On the count of ‘three’, you two pull the driver off of the gear shifter. He dislodges at the end, after a series of tough pulls, and the three of you spill out of the cab onto the street. You get up to see that the driver was difficult to dislodge because the gear shifter didn’t go straight into his breastbone; rather, it was twisted under the skin towards the left-side of his body. The driver’s chest was spurting blood rapidly.

“Oh no!” screams Deputy 3. “I have never had someone die that I rescued!!!” He then begins attempts to stop the blood from squirting out. After two minutes of failed attempts, blood stopped pumping and the driver’s body went limp. Deputy 3 stared at the body and looked blank. You try to get his attention, but he is unresponsive.

“Deputy 3! Snap out of it!” you scream at him. He looks over at you and says, “Where am I?”

The fire department and EMS arrive at this time. You run over to the fire commander and report what happened. You then put her in charge, as Incident Commander, because your nerves are shot.

The first commander resolves the situation and you go home.

The next week, while at the Sheriff’s department, Deputy 1 and 3 try to talk to you about what happened during the previous week’s incident. You say, “Shut up! Don’t be such sissies. People die in our line of work. Just man up and move on.”

The following week, Deputy 1 called out sick. The next week, Deputy 1 and 3 called out sick, each, for three (3) days.

A few days later, Deputy 1 comes to your office and closes the door. He says that he has not been able to sleep and he keeps on ‘seeing’ his child’s lifeless body on the road.

Later than day, you find Deputy 3 asleep in his patrol car. You open the door and smell alcohol...it looks like he got drunk and fell while on duty.

You are now the Fire Commander on the scene. The Sheriff mumbled a few things to you and then walked off. You now have to complete the Seven Critical Tasks to effectively resolve the scene.

1. Pursuant to the accident and the known measurements layed out (9 feet per vehicle lane and the 20 feet distance between the semi-truck cab and over-turned vehicle), SUMMARIZE, in detail how you would establish control and communications, identify the hot zone, and where you would establish the inner perimeter.

2. Pursuant to the accident and the known measurements layed out (9 feet per vehicle lane and the 20 feet distance between the semi-truck cab and over-turned vehicle), SUMMARIZE, in detail, where you would establish the outer perimeter, where you would establish the command post, where you would establish a staging area, and identify what additional resources are needed.

3. ANALYZE how NIMS could specifically be used to assist the remedial county Sheriff’s Department- based upon their actions (or lack of).

Please use three or more references and use 1500 words or less. Thank you

Answer 1

1) Being a fire commander this is how one should establish control and communication:

In order to take control over the situation I would appoint all the officers different roles, i.e, Identify the Hot zone and mark it as a inner perimeter (the area which is affected with the heat generated and can be dangerous to enter that area). There should be two way communication between the Commander and the officers. Any upates or improvement in situation should be pass on to all. Each and every members should be aware with the latest updates.The 18*20 feet area should be covered with the inner permeter signs. It could be more than that area based on the identified hot zone.

This identified hot zone would acts as a dangerous zone. The main target for the commander would be to establish the function which has different scenarios in order to tackle the situation.

j indexes trucks;
lei) index set of trucks compatible with order i,
Given Data
ci) round-trip transportation cost of delivering order i with truck i,
ti) round-trip transportation time of delivering order i with truck i,
5
i
,s, maximum and minimum shift lengths for truck i,
"ii' ~j penalty cost rates for violating shift length restrictions.
Decision Variables
Yij binary variable indicating whether or not order i is to be dispatched as a load
on truckj;
x) trivalent variable indicating the applicable elastic penalty ("i), O,~j)" for shift
lengths of any solution.
Integer Linear Program
min c..y .. + x.[s. - t..y .. ] }' LJ LJ IJIJ LJ}} LJIJIJ . i jEJ(i) j i
(1)
24
subject to
GERALD G. BROWN AND GLENN W. GRAVES
2: .Yij= 1, allr;
jEJ(i)
(a) Sj = 5j and xj = Zj when 2: tU.yu > ~i; i
(b) s.j = -}s, and xj = ~j when 2: lijYU <u: i
(2)
(3)
(c) ~'=~'V~j and xj = 0 when Sj' <; t..y.. <; s,; - L.J y~ !J .J' i
)JuE {O, 1}, all i, j. (4)
Note that the penalties satisfy Zj <; 0 <;~J by implication when §j < ~i'

2) Pursuant to the accident and the known measurements layed out (9 feet per vehicle lane and the 20 feet distance between the semi-truck cab and over-turned vehicle)

for the outer perimeter

An elastic integer linear programming procedure and supporting data were developed and improved over many months. Benchmarks for the prototype system were extracted from daily operations at several bulk terminals and used to compare offline system results side by side with actual manual dispatch performance. The early results were very encouraging. REAL-TIME DISPATCH OF PETROLEUM TANK TRUCKS 25 Compared with manual dispatches, the system produces extremely uniform distribution of workload among vehicles with significantly lower transportation costs. For those cases in which shift limits are violated, the system gives the explicit economic rationale for this outcome, and consequently proves to have excellent face validity for dispatchers and management. In this respect, the system wins the competition without qualification. The benchmarks have also produced some unexpected results. Some popular rules of thumb used by manual dispatchers in Step 3 prove to be very uneconomical. Further, the system relentlessly reveals undetected data errors (a distinct advantage of optimization) that have instigated major internal review of transportation cost and time standards. Finally, it has become clear that some bulk terminal areas are significantly more difficult to dispatch well than others. Surprisingly, it is much easier for the automated system to produce a good dispatch for a large terminal than for a small one. Unfortunately, the conditions under which the system must operate are rather severe. Since the dispatch system must cohabit in real time with a large information management system in constant use, very little pure computational power remains. Worse, the architecture of the real-time computer system is totally oriented to a transaction-driven software package. Each transaction is expected to consume minimal resources-at most, a fraction of a second of computer time and a very small region. Overall performance considerations for the system do not permit large, heavily computational tasks to be performed without unconscionable delay in response time (either that for the originating dispatcher, or for the hundreds of other users of the system at the time). Even more, the operating system resource monitor expects transactions to consume increments of system resources in uniform, small, and predictable quanta.

3)

At this point, and certainly with no misplaced sense of nobility, an heuristic was considered. First, sheer speed is of the essence. Second, the problems occur with regular structure in day-to-day operations at each bulk terminal, providing both an opportunity to develop site-specific tuning and a fairly reliable method to detect misbehavior. Finally, the model can be fully optimized for purposes of calibration and selective audit by the off-line optimization system already available. The design of the heuristic draws from computational experience with the quadratic assignment model [7] and hybrids with linear programming [5], [8]. Also, the underlying network structure (exclusive of the gains and attendant floating point arithmetic and basis structure) invites application of a pure network algorithm embedded in the heuristic. With this in mind, the following simple solution procedure was developed. A sequence of embedded network problems is generated and solved with a variant of GNET [1]. Each such solution is used to fix some of the orders as loads on trucks. This process is terminated when all orders are assigned, or when no further progress can be made. The generic network problem is shown in Figure 3 and described mathematically below. Notation Indexes indexes unassigned orders, only (cardinality m); j indexes trucks; lei) index set of compatible trucks. REAL-TIME DISPATCH OF PETROLEUM TANK TRUCKS Given Data k denotes a dummy order (e.g., k = 0) /. total of tl)" for orders already assigned as loads on truck j; .I T j remaining truck time projection: (~j~' - Zj~ j) / (~j - Zj) - ~; tinf , tsup smallest, largest standard transportation times for unassigned orders; 'c;! projected, penalized transportation cost; ~! maximum number of orders still assignable to truck j: b. = { 1+ lTj / tin f if ~! > 0, .I ° . otherwise, (l indicates the next lower in teger.); u. range of the number of orders still assignable to truck): .I 27 u. = { ~! - l~! / tsu p if ~! > 0, .I ° otherwise; d total excess (unassignable) orders: 2:)~! - m. Decision Variables J'u variable indicating whether or not order i is preferred as a load on truck); 5 j variable indicating estimated surplus loads preferred for truck). Embedded Network' subject to (sources) (sinks) min ""' ""' c'.v. r L..J L..J Yo/' ~I . i jEJ(i) 2: Yij < 1, all i; jEJ(i) - Sj - 2: Yij= - bj , all); i (1) (2) (3) (4) Yij E {a, I}, all i,); Sj E {integer}, all j.

Thank you for giving me this opportunity to answer.