Staying Out of Harm's Way

News from the National Weather Service indicates a hurricane is headed toward your community. Do you encourage residents to board up their windows, stow their lawn furniture, and leave town?

History has shown that evacuation creates its own problems. During Hurricane Floyd, which struck the lower Atlantic coast in 1999, emergency management officials saw more than three million residents of Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina take to the highways—the largest evacuation in history. In the resulting traffic snarl, people were trapped inside their vehicles for as long as 24 hours without access to rest rooms, filling stations, or food. The mass exodus immediately filled temporary shelters and overwhelmed the ability of state and local officials to manage or respond to widespread gridlock.

Since Hurricane Floyd, many local governments have come to realize that evacuation may have been oversold. “We have done a reasonable job of getting vulnerable people who live on the seashore or in mobile homes to leave, but a lot of others who don’t need to evacuate have been leaving too,” says Bob Collins, PBS&J evacuation planning expert. “Also, a lot of people who evacuate go too far. They need to leave the barrier islands, certainly, but they don’t necessarily need to leave their districts entirely and get stuck in traffic. Being in a house is likely to be a lot safer than being in a car. And the better solution is to encourage people to find shelter locally.”

Learning from Experience

To keep from repeating evacuation problems experienced during Hurricane Floyd, the U.S. Department of Transportation and FEMA commissioned PBS&J to develop the Evacuation Traffic Information System (ETIS), a unique computer model that allows state and federal officials to predict the number and destinations of evacuees. The program makes it possible for communities to do a better job of preparing temporary shelters, food centers, and other facilities for a massive evacuation. And states can better coordinate their response activities.

The ETIS was tested during Hurricane Lili, in 2002. Close to 500,000 people were advised to leave coastal and low-lying areas in Texas and Louisiana as the storm approached. At the time, Chuck Gregg, FEMA Region 6 hurricane program manager, reported, “Deploying the ETIS technology during the approach of Hurricane Lili allowed us for the first time to gather more evacuation information in one place than had ever been possible before.”

The first true application of the ETIS was during Hurricane Isabel last fall when ETIS was used extensively by the state emergency managers team to plan evacuation routes. According to Mike Foran, manager, Emergency Preparedness Staff for the Federal Aviation Administration, “While there is a still a need for real-time traffic information, ETIS provides a means of communicating between the impacted states, evacuating states, and receiving states that was not there before. The states within FEMA Region 4 all support continuing and improving on this type of tool, making it an all-hazards tool that can be used in any circumstance.”

Don Lewis, who leads PBS&J’s Evacuation Planning Division, believes that maintaining communications with evacuees is also key to successful evacuations—before, during, and after a major storm. “Because people are in their cars during an evacuation, we are looking at things like intelligent transportation systems (ITS), in-vehicle communications, like OnStar ®, global positioning system (GPS) technology, and cell phones to keep the lines of communication open,” he says.

Shelters from the Storm

Paralleling the need for evacuation planning is the requirement for safe havens, local shelters where residents and visitors can retreat for greater protection and to receive communications.

Post-storm assessments of 1992’s Hurricane Andrew identified a significant shortage of safe shelter space in Florida, which bore the brunt of the storm’s 160-mile-an-hour winds. In response, the state legislature enacted a law that created a comprehensive strategy to eliminate the statewide deficit. Central to the plan was a hurricane shelter survey and retrofit program, along with a requirement for new public schools facilities which typically serve as shelters to be designed and built to withstand major hurricanes. The Florida Division of Emergency Management (FDEM) was directed to administer the program and to provide an annual listing of facilities recommended for retrofitting using state funds.

“Before any retrofits could be made, we literally had to define what a ‘safe’ shelter was,” says Danny Kilcollins, FPEM, Aff.ASCE at FDEM. “The safety criteria had to be based on recognized state and national standards, guidelines, and best practices, and it had to fit within the resources of FDEM and our stakeholder partners.” After much research and field-testing, the American Red Cross’ Guidelines for Hurricane Evacuation Shelter Selection (ARC 4496) was selected.

With those guidelines in hand, work could begin in earnest. “Most shelters are schools, but in the past, most schools were not designed to be hurricane shelters,” says Ben Doan, PBS&J vice president and West Florida Construction Services division manager, who has been working with FDEM. “For example, schools typically have a lot of windows, and during hurricanes you don’t want a lot of windows. One of the things we are doing is helping to develop retrofits like mechanical shutters. We also produce a report that highlights available space, and this information is now available to emergency managers on personal digital assistants so they can close up a shelter when it becomes full.”

Largely because of the survey and retrofit program, Florida’s deficit of hurricane shelter space has been reduced by at least 50 percent since 2000. FDEM also estimates that about 100,000 spaces will be added to the state’s inventory each year.

“The bottom line is that with proper evacuation planning, the right support tools in place, and better local shelters, we’ll all weather the big storms more successfully,” sums up Lewis.