Emergency medical services via inland waterways

As emergency managers prepare contingency plans for incident response, it is important to recognize the resource offered by the nation's inland waterways. This research investigates the feasibility of using inland waterway transportation to provide emergency medical response to catastrophic incidents. For many communities, inland waterways can provide medical services and equipment when other modes of transportation are inaccessible because of capacity overload or destruction. Our research objective is to develop a feasibility index to measure the potential of a given community to benefit from inland waterway-based emergency medical services. The Waterway Emergency Medical Service (WEMS) feasibility index guides emergency managers in evaluating the feasibility of incorporating emergency medical services via inland waterways into their emergency operations planning. A demonstration of the WEMS index on the state of Arkansas is presented.