Pre-Incident Planning for CBRN Waste Management Webinar
About the Webinar
Originally presented July 13, 2022
Past experience has shown that communities with comprehensive and well-coordinated waste management plans recover more quickly and at a lower cost from natural and manmade disasters, making these communities more resilient. Unfortunately, planning for waste management generated as a result of chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear incidents has been identified as a major capability gap in overall Homeland Security Response and Recovery Preparedness.
EPA has developed a step-by-step online tool - the All Hazards Waste Management Planning Tool - to help emergency planners and responders develop pre-incident waste management plans. This tool provides a framework to help managers, planners, and responders initiate plan development, providing variable degrees of assistance from simple outlines of plan contents, to providing scenario-specific waste quantity value estimates to use in developing a plan. It also includes detailed information on waste management facilities and information on transportation options. This webinar will provide an overview of the tool and provide examples of how emergency response personnel could use the tool to start pre-incident planning today.
About the Presenter
Anna Tschursin holds degrees in General Biology, as well as Environmental Biology and Public Policy. She has been employed by the US EPA for nearly 30 years and has spent the last 15 years focusing on waste management issues related to homeland security incidents. Anna participated in numerous exercises and real-life responses such as the Gulf oil spill and hurricane Sandy, and has provided support to states and localities in preparing waste management plans for large scale events. She has led the effort to develop a 4-step process for pre-incident waste management planning for large scale events, and to develop a functional, dynamic and interactive web-based application to aid organizations at various levels in pre-incident waste management planning for large-scale homeland security incidents.