NEW YORK -- A new computer modeling program can help government, law enforcement, and first responders figure out how to react to disasters and best help people affected by catastrophes.

Planning with Large Agency-Networks against Catastrophes, or Plan-C for short, is a program developed at New York University's Center for Catastrophe Preparedness and Response. The program allows disaster relief agencies to simulate a catastrophic event like a hurricane or terrorist attack.

But unlike other modeling software that runs similar simulations, this one also tries to predict how citizens will react, based on a whole slew of factors including their level of fear and how much they know about what's going on.

“The way you should approach disasters, that there are an infinite number of [factors] - the weather's good, the weather's bad, the people are all elderly, it's a festival of children or whatever it is,” said Lewis Goldfrank, NYU’s Chairman of Emergency Medicine.

"And you've got to understand that the world has so many vulnerable people and so many special populations, that you've got to design your work to address all the critical issues," continued Goldfrank.

Most crisis scenarios are pretty rare, but where local, state, and federal officials value this new software for helping them prepare for the most unexpected of the unexpected situations.

“We don't see hurricanes of category 4 in New York City, but if we had one we'd want to know the impact would be,” said Commissioner Joseph Bruno of the New York City Office of Emergency Management.

“That's really a pretty basic model - what kind of housing we have, how many people in the zones, what we can expect, how many we move out. Plan C gives us kind of a more sophisticated view of that impact,” continued Bruno.

Plan C has been in development for three years, and NYU now plans to get input about the program from local, state, and federal officials, in order to better tailor it to their particular needs.