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Emergency department (ED) overcrowding is a nationwide problem affecting the safety and preparedness of our health care system. Many hospital EDs face significant short and intense surges in demand on a daily basis. However, the surge in demand during disaster event is not short and intense, but it is a sustained one. In order to meet this sudden surge as defined above, hospital EDs need to be more prepared and efficient to cater to increased volume of demand involving huge uncertainties. This thesis looks at the creation and use of discrete event simulation modeling using ARENA 10.0 software. In this thesis, an attempt is made to show how the different arrival patterns and time durations for which victims keep arriving affect the EDs ability to treat the patients. It is shown, how the model can be used to estimate additional resources that would be required to accommodate additional patients within the ED. Various shapes of arrival distributions were tested for different time durations. It was found that the arrival distribution with parameters (3, 4), (3, 3), (4, 2) and (2, 4) did not challenge the institutional capacity. In other words, the hospital was able to treat all the patients without compromising the quality of care up to 24 hours. However, distribution with parameter (3, 2), (2, 2), (3, 1), (1, 2), (2, 3), (2, 1), (1