Applications

Household Hazardous Waste Recon DB

This database was used for several months (October 2005 ñ February 2006) during household hazardous waste reconnaissance efforts conducted at Grande Isle, Louisiana as part of the Hurricane Katrina cleanup project conducted by the US EPA. The database was used to collect and prioritize HHW information, obtain GPS readings of the HHW location, and to link photographs to database records, which assisted onsite work crews in identifying, managing, and staging/removing the HHW. Some of the main benefits of this system include:

  • Deployed in 1 1/2 days time from concept to working database in the hands of the field crews
  • Built on site using a laptop while living and working in a recreational vehicle with no permanent electric grid (no need for high end computer equipment or facilities)
  • Was able to provide data back to local "on the ground" work crews and management team instead of relying on EPAs centralized management for localized decision-making
  • Maintained all stakeholders informed in near real-time, including EPA START Team, ERRS contractor, and USACE personnel
  • Utilized the synchronization capability of the system to copy photographs to local laptop hard drives of stakeholders, allowing each to visually see HHW instead of merely reading a description of the HHW
  • System was ported to existing FEMA Pocket PCs and configured to read the GPS cards supplied by FEMA (no additional hardware was required)

Acronyms used on this page:
EPA: Environmental Protection Agency
ERRS: Emergency and Rapid Response Services
FEMA: Federal Emergency Management Agency
GPS: Global Positioning Systems
HHW: Household Hazardous Waste
START: Superfund Technical Assessment and Response Team
USACE: US Army Corps of Engineers