As REGAL’s Evacuation Planning Tool (EPT) continues to expand, its enhancements, features, and capabilities are currently evolving the tool into the Emergency Management field. With that said, REGAL has added to the EPT Suite, and would like to announce the development of PRE-EMPT.

The PRE-Emergency Management Planning Tool (PRE-EMPT) is the newest member to the EPT Suite, and offers evacuation and loading planning features in the same graphical user interface as the original EPT software. PRE-EMPT will offer planning from the internal building evacuation to the road networks during an evacuation. This capability will give stakeholders the opportunity to perform a variety of scenarios on different levels while incorporating surrounding traffic networks and those concerns. PRE-EMPT will continue to have the core capabilities of evacuation simulation that the EPT came to be known for; however the end user will now be able to plan for the full cycle of a mass evacuation.

As REGAL continues to work with government agencies on existing capabilities; some additional enhancements to the EPT Suite will include:

• Plume Dispersion Modules
• Human Behavior Modules
• Explosion modules
• Fire Modules
• Virtual Table Top Exercises (T3)

PRE-EMPT’s capabilities will give the stakeholders the ability to capture a visual picture of entities leaving in their vehicles, the use of mass transit, as well as emergency equipment responding to the scene or incident. This new focus will not only allow first responders to train on large area scenarios, but will provide the opportunity to prepare for the unknown issues that arise on road networks. Ultimately, once a specific scenario is developed, community and first responder leaders will gain the foresight through simulation to train and plan accordingly.

Daily threat warnings seem to be appearing more and more frequently. With the increasing evidence of intelligence and the uprise of recent government warnings, it seems Al Qaeda is gearing up and planning for additional attacks. As quoted from an article by Matthew Harwood of Security Management Magazine, these threat warnings come at the same time that U.S. security officials last week reported an uptick in suspicious activity within the U.S. aviation sector, ABC News reports.

The alert comes during a week in which American law enforcement officials described an "unusually high" number of people on the no-fly list attempting to board flights to or in the United States.

At least six people on the no-fly list were denied boarding in a 48-hour period between Saturday and Monday this week, according to the officials.

Two of the six were stopped at London's Heathrow Airport.

Matthews’s article also reported that the U.S. intelligence officials warn that the same al Qaeda group that attacked a U.S. airliner on Christmas Day has also trained female suicide bombers to attack Western targets. With that said, it has become more and more evident that our society needs to be prepared sooner rather than later. Today’s stake holders not only have the responsibility to test their emergency management plans, but they also must implement the plans as well. As these plans continue to be developed and tested, REGAL will maintain their support to local schools and organizations as well providing the tools necessary to make sure that stakeholders are successful in their emergency management tasks.