Selecting scenarios for environmental disaster planning

Where an agency is aware of potential disasters, it often seeks to identify just a few potential accidents to consider in depth such that they will give maximum information about all possible accidents, without demanding an excessive budget. In this paper the disasters considered are sudden release of a catastrophic quantity of pollutant into the environment. By considering a limited number of different pollutants, dividing the environment into a finite number of zones and the year into a few time periods, a finite number of potential disasters is defined. Then from this finite set of accidents the goal is to identify just a few whose elaboration into disaster scenarios will yield information relevant to all of the potential disasters. This is achieved by solving an integer program with the objective of maximizing similarity between the few selected accidents and the total set of potential accidents. The approach is illustrated with an actual study to define a ‘most informative’ scenario of a major liquid spill in an inland waterway.