MAE Center Participates in FEMA-DOE Energy Assurance Meeting
On September 28-30, Anisa Como, Liang Chang, and Timothy Gress of the MAE Center attended the FEMA Region V – DOE Energy Assurance Workshop, organized by The Federal Emergency Management Agency Region V, in collaboration with National Association of State Energy Officials and the Office of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability, Department of Energy. The objectives of the workshop were to introduce the damage and cascading effects following a catastrophic seismic event within FEMA Region V and to provide the industry, state energy emergency planners, state emergency planners, and members of the federal team with the modeling results, obtained by implementing the best science and modeling tools available.
Additional objectives involved outlining the roles, responsibilities, and limitations of all the aforementioned categories, identifying existing planning factors and emergency plans from industry, and improving regional communication and collaboration among all. Some of the attendees of this workshop involved the MAE Center, Central U.S. Earthquake Consortium (CUSEC), FEMA, state emergency managers, Department of Energy, Department of Transportation, USGS, Argonne National Laboratory, and several utilities companies, such as Shell, Marathon, Ameren, BP, Dynegy, ComEd, NICOR, Vectren, and Boardwalk.
The workshop started with the presentations outlining risk, state-of-the-art modeling, and impact results regarding a seismic event in the region. The MAEC presented overall impact assessment result for the Central U.S. from a New Madrid Seismic Zone (NMSZ) event, and focused in detail on the impact to highway bridges, railway bridges, and major river crossings damage. Furthermore, MAEC created and presented GeoPDFs, mapping the damage Illinois and Indiana, the two directly affected states of Region V, from a NMSZ event. Modeling and impact results presentations were followed by panel discussions that addressed several issues related to emergency response procedures
The MAEC products were further utilized during these discussions to communicate to the participants the damaged regions and to identify possible gaps of service and communications that would be essential in emergency plans. The MAE Center attended all the panel discussion sessions and assisted with any questions or comments regarding the scenario modeling and impact assessment results. The workshop provided a great opportunity for the MAEC to present the best available scientific modeling and impact results of the region, and to obtain useful feedback on modeling and demands regarding post-processing results.
