How does the weather tracking and chemical plume modeling work?
If you had some sort of hazardous chemical release, whoever arrives on the scene fires up our 911 GIS software. They’re pinpointing their location — the location of the release, the accident, the intersection — that sort of thing. Now they hit the live weather data, because with [the software], you need to start entering some information so it can model the plume: wind direction, speed, ambient temperature, precipitation, humidity. Once that’s done, [the application] creates the plume, and then the plume is dumped over into the GIS and plotted on the digital map. So now you see a good estimation of where that plume is going to go and whom it’s going to affect. Once you have that plume on the map, you can start looking at where you want to set your roadblocks so you don’t have the public entering that plume. You’re going to have the EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] coming in from Columbus; somebody coming from Springfield, Ohio. Once that’s done, you have the ability to select al
