Assessment of Emergency Room Designs for Protection against an Internal Chemical Threat

Abstract

Emergency rooms are critical infrastructures that provide acute care and rapid treatment of sudden illnesses and trauma. These life saving services must remain in continuous operation. An internal chemical attack on an emergency room would interrupt these essential services and severely impact the capabilities of the health care professionals and staff. In this paper, a combination of multizone simulation and statistical modeling are used as tools to assess emergency room designs for protection against an internal chemical threat. Design options include: the use of dilution ventilation, additional air handling equipment, gas phase filtration, building segmentation, and a sensor system to improve response time. Protection levels are placed into discrete categories and an ordered probability model (with random effects) is estimated. This model identifies factors, such as the design option, chemical type, elapsed time after chemical release, and the air handling unit’s operational and maintenance costs that significantly influence protection levels. Marginal effects are also computed to measure the impact of these factors on the protection-category probabilities. The results of this study can assist owners, designers, and decision makers by providing a quantitative methodology to assess building designs for protection against chemical threats.