Emergency Transportation Preparedness, Management, and Response in Urban Planning and Development

Abstract

The planning and management of transportation systems for emergencies is a field that is finally beginning to receive the level of attention that it has so critically lacked for decades. My introduction to transportation planning for emergencies began about 10 years ago, after Hurricane Georges threatened to strike New Orleans. Prior to that I had never met a transportation engineer or planner working in emergency management nor, despite many years of education and practice in highway design, traffic engineering , and traffic modeling, ever read an article about the application of transportation principles to mass emergency response. I have since learned that there are a handful of experts who have been working in this field for decades, particularly on the research side. Unfortunately, little of their work has ever made it into practice. This historic low level of involvement from the professional transportation community and lack of knowledge transfer has and continues to cost society dearly. After arriving at Louisiana State University LSU I became involved in the development of a proposal to model the flooding impacts of hurricanes on the Louisiana coast, largely resulting from the accelerated land loss in the coastal marsh regions the devastating effects of which were well-documented in wake of Hurricane Katrina. As part of the project, we wanted to examine the potential effect of storm-surge scenarios on evacuation routes. Having spent the majority of my life far from hurricanes, I had no expertise on the topic of evacuation. Undaunted, I set out to collect information on prior evacuation-related transportation research. To my astonishment, there was little to be found. While the subject had a long and well-documented history in fields like geography and the behavioral/sociological sciences, there were only a few researchers in transportation planning and engineering who were or had been actively addressing evacuation-related topics. The search for information ultimately led to a state-of-the-practice review Wolshon et al. 2005a,b. Among the most telling findings of this effort was that none of the departments of transportation DOT in states threatened by hurricanes at that time had a person designated to coordinate planning for evacuations. The general feeling was that evacuations were the purview of state and local emergency management offices and, although the DOTs would assist when called upon, there was little that they could do. It was also the general opinion of the day that evacuations were a simple problem of too much demand and not enough supply, in which the amount of traffic generated would quickly overwhelm the available roadway capacity. Perhaps even more alarming was that, at the time, the topic of evacuation seemed not to warrant attention in the transportation field. This was amazing because it also seemed obvious that an evacuation, especially if done poorly, had the potential to impact more people over a shorter period than nearly any other transportation scenario. We have come to realize that many of the opinions and views held merely a decade ago were not correct. Unfortunately, these realizations have not come easy. Hurricane Floyd in 1999 was a watershed event that revealed how ill-prepared transportation agencies were to deal with the new paradigm of hurricane evacuations. Floyd made it clear that the growth in population within the coastal zones of the United States during the period of relatively low tropical storm activity of the 1980s and 1990s meant that evacuations could no longer be viewed as isolated events impacting sparsely populated areas. It is now recognized that an evacuation of any major urban population center will have regional impacts; the evacuation of Miami will affect roads up to Orlando and Jacksonville, the evacuation of Houston will impact freeways in Dallas, and so on. The Floyd evacuation also showed an inability to collect timely traffic-flow information on inland evacuation routes and communicate useful travel information to evacuees. This impacted both the evacuees as well as the destinations that were preparing to receive them. Perhaps most critically , Floyd showed that there was a near absence of coordination of transportation resources between adjoining states, state and federal government, the various governmental levels within states, and between transportation and emergency management agencies. In the wake of Hurricane Floyd, several initiatives were launched to begin addressing these issues. Among the most significant was the founding of the Transportation Research Board's Subcommittee on Emergency Evacuation http://www.rsip. lsu.edu/anb10-3/ in 2000. This committee was created with the mission of serving as the national focal point for evacuation-related transportation issues as well as to provide leadership for the cooperation and coordination of individuals and groups involved in the field. It seeks to promote the advancement, dissemination , and implementation of state-of-the-art methods and systems for enhancing evacuation efficiency and safety. Recently, the subcommittee has broadened its scope beyond just evacuations to include more general mass emergency-related transportation topics including all preparedness and operational issues associated with both natural and man-made threats, including emergency transportation management and policy; emergency planning and travel/behavioral analysis and forecasting; the planning and design of transportation infrastructure for emergencies; the analysis and modeling of evacuation transportation operations; evacuation traffic control and enforcement; the development, implementation , and operation of intelligent transportation system ITS data acquisition and communication systems; and the use of mass-transit/commercial fleets for the movement of low-mobility individuals and emergency relief supplies. As efforts were being made to focus attention on evacuation as a major planning, engineering, and research issue within transportation , several other events reinforced emergency transportation JOURNAL OF URBAN PLANNING AND DEVELOPMENT © ASCE / MARCH 2007 / 1