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State governments are increasingly requiring state and local emergency management offices to maintain lists of persons with special needs who may require assistance in disaster situations. In addition, federal courts are beginning to apply the Americans with Disabilities Act. to emergency planning. This study characterizes special-needs households that are located in the vicinity of a chemical weapons storage site in Alabama. For this study, a special-needs household is defined as a residence having at least one person with physical or mental problems, a transportation dependence, or a child who is home alone at limes and requires assistance from outside the family or current circle of relatives, friends, and neighbors to take specific protective actions. The special-needs households were identified throngh a myriad of collection methods, including random sampling, saturation mailing/self-registration, targeted distribution/self-registration, agency and support provider lists, and referrals. Attitudes toward specific protective actions and an assessment of the ability of the special-needs household to take those actions were also sought out. Approximately 9 percent of the community's households were identified as containing persons with special needs who require assistance during emergencies. The study also identified the highly perishable nature of special-needs population records maintained by emergency management agencies. During a data verification process conducted 3 months after the data collection effort concluded, almost half of the previously identified 3,294 individuals with special needs had their situation change or could not be reached for verification. Concurrently, 1,090 new persons with special needs identified themselves as needing assistance. Recommendations are made to the emergency planning community for addressing the support needs of special populations.

A graphical depiction of the entire emergency response process via a synchronization matrix is an effective management too for optimizing the design, exercise, and real-life implementation of emergency plans. This system-based approach to emergency planning depicts how a community organizes its response tasks across space and time. It gives responders the opportunity to make real-time adjustments to maximizing the often limited resources in protecting area residents. An effective response to any natural or technological hazard must involve the entire community and must not be limited by individual jurisdictions and organizations acting on their own without coordination, integration, and synchronization.An emergency response to an accidental release of chemical warfare agents from one of this nation's eight chemical weapons stockpile sites, like any other disaster response, is complex. It requires the rapid coordination, integration, and synchronization of multiple levels of governmental and nongovernmental organizations from numerous jurisdictions, each with varying response capabilities, into a unified community response. The community response actions occur in an area extending from an on-site storage location to points 25 or more miles away. Actions are directed and controlled by responding local governments and agencies situated within the response area, as well as by state and federal operations centers quite removed from the area of impact. Time is critical and the protective action decision-making process is greatly compressed. To ensure an effective response with minimal confusion, given the potential catastrophic nature of such releases, the response community must carefully synchronize response operations.