A GIS-BASED Vulnerability ASSESSMENT and DISASTER

Water resources and infrastructure, including aquifers, represent “critical infrastructure and key resources” as defined by the National Infrastructure Protection Plan (NIPP) of 2009.  The importance of these key resources and assets provides the motivation to develop methods for assessing their vulnerability to natural or anthropogenic threats.  GIS-based tools improve upon existing methods used to assess the vulnerability of aquifers to unintentional and/or intentional harm and the resultant consequences of that harm.  The Water Resources Vulnerability Assessment Tool (WRVAT), an ArcGIS-based desktop tool, has been developed in response to the need to provide a comprehensive inventory and efficiently asses the vulnerability of groundwater systems, at any scale.  Vulnerability assessments conducted using the WRVAT consider intrinsic characteristics of the system, extrinsic threats (both accidental and intentional) to the system, and the consequences of system compromise. This work identifies existing threats and provides a methodology for more readily identifying hazards to groundwater resources and infrastructure by determining the critical intrinsic characteristics and external threats affecting these resources and infrastructure. 

WRVAT also enables more efficient and effective emergency response preparedness to possible threats and hazards associated with these key water resources and related infrastructure. The WRVAT facilitates dynamic building and analysis of disaster scenarios to investigate resource resilience and emergency response.  Disaster scenarios can be developed and evaluated using the analysis tools within the WRVAT for groundwater. The goal is to enable the WRVAT to become a unique collaborative environment that can be used by emergency planners and responders to rapidly exchange information, analyze impending and current disaster outcomes, and generate and share reports of disaster scenario analyses.