Security, health, transportation

Consider how the different parts of our technical community relate to national objectives. Each of the principal sectors --university, industry, and government--are engaged continuously in activities that fulfill a series of national objectives. Industrial research functions primarily as a mechanism for economic growth. Universities, of course, fill a reservoir of basic research and provide training. Each government agency that has technical component supports R D related to its particular mis-sion--national security, health, transportation, and so on. 

Communication and information handling may be dominant modes of easing the strenuous demands for food, shelter, energy transport and security, as well as health and education. And the former remain also primary demands for raw materials in a crowded planet. So in looking toward tomorrow, the role of polymers would extend beyond the major part they play already in the conventional functions of society which we have noted. 

As a response to the events of September 11,2001, the National Security and Homeland Defense Workshop was included as one of six workshops held as part of Challenges for the Chemical Sciences in the 21st Century. The workshop topics reflect areas of societal need—materials and manufacturing, energy and transportation, national security and homeland defense, public health, information and communications, and environment. The charge for each workshop was to address the four themes of discovery, interfaces, challenges, and infrastructure as they relate to the workshop topic ... 

Disaster planning must include a community mutual aid plan in the event that the hospital (s), nursing home(s), or other residential health care facility needs to be evacuated. Plans for evacuation of health care facilities must be realistic and achievable, and contain sufficient specific detail as to where patients will be relocated to and who will be there to care for them. Patient evacuation was a major challenge to disaster response efforts following Hurricane Katrina, and was hampered by the destruction of all major transportation routes in and out of the city. Pre-planning for the possibility of the need to evacuate entire health care facilities must address alternative modes of transportation and include adequate security measures (see Figure 1.4). 

Strengthen public health security in travel and transport... 

The structure of the Workshop on the Environment followed that of the parent project and each of the other workshops that were held as part of the study of Challenges for the Chemical Sciences in the 21st Century (Materials and Manufacturing, Energy and Transportation, National Security and Homeland Defense, Information and Communications, and Health and Medicine). Under this structure, the workshop addressed four specific themes ... 

Collect and evaluate performance data on the health, safety, security, environment, and transportation programs of each potential, qualified carrier. 

As discnssed in Chapter 3, the results of the initial company-level prioritization were based solely on the chemical hazards and identified facihties whose transportation operations would require a facihty/operational level review. The focus of this example is on the security of the hazardous materials in and out of a single XYZ Chemical facihty, and is the same Asian plant that was evaluated for safety issues in Chapters 4 and 5. In addition to the corporate directive to evaluate transportation safety risk at this facihty, the site security manager was informed of the need to complete a security risk analysis of the hazardous materials in transit. To inihate the security review, the security manager and health and safety manager met to review the findings of the safety analysis. In addition to focusing on chemicals and hazards from the initial safety prioritizahon, the security prioritization process also considers ... 

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