Quantifying the land and population risk of sewage spills overland using a fine-scale, DEM-based GIS model.

Accidental releases of untreated sewage into the environment, known as sewage spills, may cause adverse gastrointestinal stress to exposed populations, especially in young, elderly, or immune-compromised individuals. In addition to human pathogens, untreated sewage contains high levels of micropollutants, organic matter, nitrogen, and phosphorus, potentially resulting in aquatic ecosystem impacts such as algal blooms, depleted oxygen, and fish kills in spill-impacted waterways. Our Geographic Information System (GIS) model, Spill Footprint Exposure Risk (SFER) integrates fine-scale elevation data (1/3 arc-second) with flowpath tracing methods to estimate the expected overland pathways of sewage spills and the locations where they are likely to pool.

Benchmarking a fast, satisficing vehicle routing algorithm for public health emergency planning and response: "Good Enough for Jazz".

Due to situational fluidity and intrinsic uncertainty of emergency response, there needs to be a fast vehicle routing algorithm that meets the constraints of the situation, thus the receiving-staging-storing-distributing (RSSD) algorithm was developed. Benchmarking the quality of this satisficing algorithm is important to understand the consequences of not engaging with the NP-Hard task of vehicle routing problem. This benchmarking will inform whether the RSSD algorithm is producing acceptable and consistent solutions to be used in decision support systems for emergency response planning.