Epidemiological Aspects of Air Pollution

An urban air pollution incident, like a natural or man-made catastrophe, presents a crisis situation which can only be relieved if adequate contingency plans have been prepared in advance and an effective control organization is in a state of operational readiness to meet the threatened emergency. Although many air pollution incident control plans have been proposed in the past, most have remained in the conceptual or theoretical stages of preparation, because the relative infrequency of serious urban air pollution crises and the disruptive nature of major emission control operations tend to limit the opportunities available for field testing of these plans. In this respect, air pollution incident control planning is analogous to strategic planning for a military operation, where the only completely legitimate test of a strategy is applied on the battlefield. In order to accomplish the transition from conceptual planning to a practical, operational field strategy for air pollution incident control, a program of incident control tests has been initiated in Chicago. These field tests, which use the city as a laboratory for the development of control strategies, are analogous to a series of military war games in which communication systems, command and control organizational structures, personnel roles, surveillance and monitoring equipment, control resources and pollution source controllability are tested under conditions which approximate as closely as possible the situation which prevails during an actual air pollution incident. This paper discusses the evolution of an incident control strategy from an initial, fixed response emission control exercise, through a meteorologically initiated control test to a fairly realistic war game series which is still developing.