The nature of incident response monitoring and assessment often requires the rapid: deployment of response teams; development of monitoring processes; and, implementation of assessments to effectively identify potential cause and effect relationships within the impacted system.
These operating environments are often subject to a range of challenges particularly related to delays in reporting of incidents, which inhibits effective sample collection, and access to reliable intelligence around the specific nature of the event. It is also often difficult to obtain information on stakeholder and community groups either involved or potentially impacted by the incident.
These challenges and response solutions will be examined through analysis of the responses to both anthropogenic and natural fish death events in the Sydney region demonstrating the role of routine monitoring in enabling determination of the causes and providing information to assist in predicting and mitigating further events.
Examples of post-incident monitoring and assessment will also be presented to demonstrate targeted analyte and sampling method selection and triage for diverse incidents such as: water quality sampling of a flood inundated town to facilitate safe clean-up operations; monitoring of water quality to detect continuing exceedances following the repair of a sewer main rupture; and the development of responsive monitoring capacity in a rural local government area.
In all case studies, findings, challenges and lessons learned will be presented to aid in development and implementation of effective sampling and analysis plans for future events.