Government agencies need to rework evacuation plans
This Chronicle story addresses some of the issues we have been discussing on Houston blogs -- the massive traffic jam last Wednesday and Thursday:
Hurricane planners have a little ditty that goes, "run from the water, hide from the wind."
It means evacuate if you are in a coastal surge area, but hunker down if you are in an area that will get hurricane-force winds and rain only.
The biggest problem in Houston's painful evacuation last week was that perhaps a million people, almost half of those who left, ran from the wind. To make matters worse, the regional evacuation plan was missing a key element — pre-planned contraflow lanes that are a part of virtually every other hurricane-prone city's evacuation strategy.
[snip]
Counseling people to stay put with a monster storm approaching is a tricky thing. Houston-area officials were stern about evacuations in the surge zones shown on their maps, but became considerably more vague about advice for everyone else.
Houston Mayor Bill White called for residents to use "common sense," but he did implore them to leave early if they were leaving.
Florida hurricane planners have learned to worry about the "shadow evacuation" — residents outside the mandatory evacuation zones who leave.
It is always much larger in the immediate aftermath of another major storm — in this case, Hurricane Katrina.
[snip]
The answer is to respect people's freedom of choice, but make sure they are educated at the beginning of each hurricane season so they can weigh realistic considerations, Baker said. His example: if you evacuate, you definitely will find yourself in a titanic traffic jam; if you stay, there may be only a one-in-five chance the storm will hit your area and, if it does, you will spend a terrifying night in your house, but probably will be fine.
The winds from a strong hurricane can rip off parts of roofs and smash windows, but solid structures stay intact and people are OK if they stay in the center of a home, away from windows, he said.
It is hard to tell an individual to endure that, he said, but from a regional standpoint, it may mean that those in the surge zones can evacuate safely.
Then the story addresses the lack of contraflow lane planning:
On the "capacity" side, not having a contraflow plan may have been a Rita-size mistake.
Harris County and the city simply didn't have them in their official emergency plans, and much of the lane mileage ultimately freed for evacuee traffic was outside their jurisdictions.
Once it became apparent that something had to change to get people moving at the height of the evacuation, the city and county asked about 2:30 a.m. Thursday for the state to open the lanes.
With no regional or state plan in place, officials scrambled to make it happen.
First, they had to determine how and where to redirect traffic. Then they had to make sure it was safe. About 10 hours later, with a long, snaking line of idling evacuees waiting, southbound lanes on I-45 were reversed. Contraflow on I-10 opened later. TxDOT looked at opening both sides of U.S. 290, but decided it would be impractical because the highway has so many entry points.
In all, state officials say, about 400 miles of highway were switched more than a day before the hurricane landed. About 100 highway barriers were needed to block opposing highway entrance ramps to make sure there weren't head-on collisions. The Department of Public Safety had to send 1,300 troopers to southeast Texas, more than a third of its force. An army of local police also helped.
That's a HUGE undertaking. It's one thing to say, "why don't they just open the other side?" and another thing to actually accomplish it.
And finally, Mayor White's complaint that the state should have been prepared for gas shortages:
The jams on evacuation routes have caused some public officials to question or criticize state officials for not providing extra gasoline along the way. White said Saturday that it was "totally unacceptable" that gas wasn't stored across the state.
That is the Texas Department of Transportation's role, White said. The state's emergency plan tasks the agency with helping motorists whose cars are disabled during an evacuation, including making sure that fuel and emergency vehicle repairs are available.
But the agency simply doesn't have the capacity to handle such an undertaking, officials said, because it does not have fleets of tanker trunks and fuel tanks spread throughout the state. Expecting large tankers to be able to stop on roadways and pump fuel directly into vehicles isn't realistic, said Zane Webb, director of TxDOT's maintenance division.
I was disappointed to see Mayor White leveling that criticism. As we learned from news reports, the number of evacuees far exceeded anything city, county, and state evacuation plans had anticipated, and those plans will now have to be reworked.
But if the mayor wants to start blasting the state for fuel shortages, the state could come back and blast the mayor for not clearly telling higher-ground residents to stay put, especially when mandatory evacuation residents hadn't gotten out yet. (The preceding sentence is Anne's opinion only -- not a consensus blogHOUSTON opinion!)
And since human nature will never be predictable, none of that is useful. Have plans ready that address as many scenarios as possible -- that's the best government can do. The rest is up to individual citizens who must make their own decisions and be prepared.
Posted by Anne Linehan @ 09/26/05 06:43 AM | Hurricane Stuff | Technorati | Sphere | Comments (10)
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