Are Incident Management Programs Effective? Findings from Washington State

摘要

The development of an incident response team (IRT) program has been touted to improve incident response and clearance times, as well as to improve interdisciplinary cooperation. To determine the effectiveness of its IRT program, the Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) commissioned a comprehensive study that considered both quantified and perceived benefits. The average duration of incidents to which the IRTs responded benefits. The average duration of incidents to which the IRTs responded was reduced by 20.6 min from 1994 to 1995. The ability to statistically attribute this reduction in incident duration to the IRT was limited because only 2 years of data were available (i.e.,reduction may be attributable to temporal variations in incident characteristics). Nonetheless, the implications of this reduction can be quantified. This reduction results in a monetary savings of