Highway Evacuations in Selected Metropolitan Areas: Assessment of Impediments

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Executive Summary

Almost 5 years after hurricanes Katrina and Rita battered Louisiana and Texas, respectively, public officials remain focused on the Nation's ability to safely evacuate large numbers of people. As a part of the Fiscal Year 2010 U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) appropriations (Public Law 111-117), the U.S. Congress requested the DOT, in cooperation with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), to:

• assess mass evacuation plans for the country's high-threat, high-density areas and identify and prioritize deficiencies on those routes that could impede evacuations, and
• conduct an analysis of how national highway system (NHS) projects under construction west of the National Capital Region (NCR) could increase the NCR's evacuation capacity and provide a detailed plan to accelerate such projects.

The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) addressed this request in two phases. First, it collaborated with DHS and internal stakeholders to identify the top 26 metropolitan areas in the country that would meet the "high-threat, high-density" criteria, but would also be representative of areas based on geographic locations and threat variances (e.g., hurricanes, hazardous materials releases, wildfire-urban interface issues, floods, and terrorist threats). The FHWA reviewed existing plans from the 26 locations and conducted interviews of FHWA Division staff, State and/or local transportation officials and State and/or local emergency management and homeland security professionals. The interviews resulted in the State and local descriptions of their plans, as well as their view of the top impediments that would frustrate mass evacuation operations. The following chart illustrates a general summary of the top impediments reported by the jurisdictions. The FHWA decided not to extrapolate further findings from these as differences in local situations make definitive findings difficult to capture. However, it is clear that jurisdictions share several common perceptions of what might impede their mass evacuation plans (e.g., day-to-day congestion, infrastructure constraints, and communications equipment and frequencies). Many of the interviewees noted that while contraflow operations, or reversal of lanes, may be practical for hurricane-prone States, it would not constitute a viable option to a quick-onset incident. However, some interviewees also noted that large-scale, mass evacuations would be extremely unlikely, especially in the case of certain "quick-onset" incidents, and for many incidents it would be preferable for citizens to shelter-in-place rather than evacuate.

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