Has there ever been a successful large scale evac?

Has any modern city in any country ever been evacuated?
If it has ever even been attempted how did it go?

Great question - lets assume 100,000 people being moved out.
Galveston?

Well New Orleans comes to mind. I suppose New York would qualify as a more 'mass exodus' than evacuation after 9/11 and also that big blackout a few years back. But those could have easily covered 100,000 people moving fast.

I am wondering about major cities, not large towns.
Galveston and New Orleans are good ones to start with.
Are there any more, in other countries maybe?
Lets try for a million or more if we can.

The Cubans seem to have a good record, but that is evacuation at gun point of course.

Dunkirk, Gallipoli, Galveston, South Houston,

Naples (Italy, not Florida) being in the shadow of Vesuvius with 3.5 million people, has practiced city-wide evacs. In 2000? 2001? the entire city got "out" in three hours...got out to where, I'm not sure. Wish I had a citation for this but I just heard it from a guide.

Hmmm, that can be arranged...

-Blast

Did you jack a few tanker cars of hand sanitizer by any chance?

OK. Thanks for the tip about Napoli.
I found an article about it.
About 1/2 million people in the danger zone.
They didn't try a full scale evac and the results were just a wee bit dissapointing.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,445941,00.html

A more recent evac drill by the US marines there only involved 150 people.

So far it does not look good for any planned evacuation of large numbers of people.

I remember during my time in the Oklahoma Army National Guard after active duty time....

I was just a fly on the wall guarding a high level meeting of the state and federal big wigs discussing this very subject.

I seem to remember the general (if unofficial) consensus at the beginning of the meeting was "Don't tell anyone the nukes are on the way". I guess the thinking was there was no way to get everyone out, so let them end "peacefully".

By the end of the meeting, I think it had become official policy. Once the powers that were saw the magnitude of the issue, they knew it would take days not hours.

Now for a hurricane or something you can see coming in advance, I think the evacuations this year on the Gulf Coast are a good example. (Admittedly smaller though.)

If you could keep them all moving, it would be more successful than the reality:

Vehicle breakdowns
Vehicles running out of gas
Road rage
Sheer panic
Poor driving habits
Drivers distracted by cell phone and laptop use
Drivers distracted by spilling coffee
Drivers trying to swat kids in back seat
Drivers weaving through traffic to get further ahead
Drivers changing their mind, trying to go in opposite direction
And the ever-present road repairs and changes, with the barriers, cones, barrels, signs and equipment.

Considering what a city looks like every morning and evening, I wouldn't expect much.

Sue

Yes, I have been trying to look at at the plans and reports on most of the places mentioned.
It is just a bit hard to find reports on evacuations that have already been done.
There are plenty of evacuation plans though
I kind of like South Galveston's Zip Code Zoning system.

An odd thought about military ideas on civilians fleeing a disaster area?
Maybe part of it is the Army would rather not have the roads clogged with fleeing refugees or have to deal with looking after them, it likely plays hell with the logistics of troop movements.

scafool: Ah! I stand corrected. Thanks for the correction and the research time you put in.

"During the mid-1990s, emergency managers tried to forge a "National Emergency Plan for the Vesuvius Region," based on what scientists now know about the volcano. The proposal was widely mocked. It involved the complete evacuation of the area's population: A total of 81 ships, 4,000 buses and 40 trains were to help all 586,417 inhabitants of the red zone make their escape. The refugees would then be resettled all over Italy on the basis of a complex formula.

But what about all those who don't want to leave their homes? What if roads are torn open, bridges shattered and rail tracks bent out of shape even before the eruption itself occurs? And is a warning period of one week even realistic? Who's responsible if everyone is really evacuated and the volcano doesn't behave in the way predicted by the scientists?"

Wonder what plans emergency managers have cooked up since then?

Having seen the plans at the time, I decided to proceed to the I-40 & I-35 interchange as quickly as possible. Upon arrival, I was going to crack open my last beer and wait for the bright flash from directly above.

Susan, I agree totally.
The only thing you are missing are the guys in the monster trucks who decide to just run over everybody else when the traffic slows down.
As far as the government moving masses of people they have to get the trucks and buses lined up and fight them through the traffic too.

The more time you have before an event, the greater the number of lives that can be saved assuming of course the authorities are competent and the evacuation carried out in an ordered fashion. Clear, concise and truthful information has to passed to the intended evacuees, no matter how dire that information is as even minutes or seconds warning can contribute to saving some lives that would otherwise be lost.

Of course knowing how to naturally form an orderly queue is more of a cultural issue.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Pinatubo#Evacuation

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Haicheng_earthquake

Pinatubo seems like an interesting one.
I am starting to get a picture about large scale evacuations.

I noticed like you said.

In this one the early warnings with accurate information made a big difference in the result.
Having a place ready to move them to helped a lot too.

In the case of the Mount Vesuvius planning they gave up on planning where to put the people they were going to move.

I guess if you heard the sirens (wavering attack signal) you only had about 30 minutes anyway, right? Here's some recordings of a few different cold war sirens. There's an old Crysler air raid model (with the V-8 engine removed) near where I live. I can only imagine how loud that sucker must've been. Eerie and fascinating at the same time.


http://www.civildefensemuseum.com/sirens.html

That old Chrysler siren is the ring tone on my phone for our reverse 911 system.

Those were also the sirens used for tornado warnings in Oklahoma when I was growing up. I still get a cold chill when I hear one tested. I hate Tornados!

PS: I live within 30 miles of all of the places he mentions on his website.

On 9/11, Washington, D.C. experienced a spontaneous, voluntary mass evacuation of the hundreds of thousands who work but don't live in the city. Some who live here also left. The President, who was in Florida that morning, was kept away for several hours.

I witnessed a good chunk of the exodus from my front steps. It was remarkably civilized and calm (drivers were more polite than on a normal day), cars stopped for traffic lights, waited their turn at 4-way stops. Drivers, their radios cranked on the news, and pedestrians streaming down the sidewalks toward destinations sometimes miles outside the Beltway, asked me and my neighbors what we were seeing on television. I welcomed into my home for a couple hours a hyperventilating stranger and her friends who had been forced to abandon their cars in their parking garage when police screamed at them to run away from the Capitol.

All the while the news was reporting that the State Department had been bombed, a plane had flown into the Pentagon, the White House had been hit and several 747s were unaccounted for and inbound over the Atlantic Ocean.

Meanwhile, the President was flying to a secure bunker in Nebraska.

In a few hours the city streets were pretty empty. By mid-afternoon it was eerily quiet (airports closed, trains stopped) as a police officer told me that he'd just come off the Southwest Freeway (part of I-395) and it was deserted.

How an evac would go in the event something like a dirty nuke went off or a chem-bio attack and residents had to also leave, I would not venture a guess. I'm afraid now that security officials have an evac plan it would be a massive screwup (such as everyone north of Pennsylvania Ave -- including Virginia residents -- would have to evac north into Maryland and everyone south would have to evac to Virginia). Theoretically Pennsylvania Avenue then would be clear for emergency vehicles to drive east and west across the city. I'd be forced to evacuate through some always dangerous neighborhoods. Scary.

From Wikipedia (for what that's worth)

Washington, D.C. has the second highest percentage of public transit commuters in the United States, behind only New York City.

Commuters have a major influence on travel patterns in Washington, D.C. 671,678 people are employed in Washington, D.C., with only 28% commuting from within the city.

After Hurricane Katrina and the New Orleans experience, this DC stat has concerned me:

35.4% of households in Washington, D.C. do not own a car.

DC car ownership is less than New Orleans' was.

"The Capitol was evacuated. And for the first time ever, the Secret Service executed the emergency plan to ensure the presidential line of succession.

At 9:57 a.m., Air Force One thundered down the runway, blasting smoke and dust in a full-thrust take off. Communications Director Dan Bartlett was on board: “It was like a rocket. For a good 10 minutes, the plane was going almost straight up.”

By 10:30 a.m., America’s largest city was devastated, its military headquarters were burning. Air Force One turned west along the Gulf Coast.

Air Force One set course for an underground command center in Nebraska. Back in Washington, the president’s closest advisor, Karen Hughes, heard about the threat to the plane and placed a call to Mr. Bush.

“And the military operator came back to me and in a voice that, to me, sounded very shaken said, ‘Ma’am, I’m sorry, we can’t reach Air Force One.’” recalls Hughes, who was out of the White House during the attacks.


It was disconcerting to be in DC when it wasn't deemed safe for the President to be there.

I don't think actual evacuation is part of it, but there are big mobilization exercises every year in Japan preparing for an earthquake. I learned about these in an international relations class; that was in the early 90's. I have a Japanese friend who said they used to be really serious but now it's more of a joke.

I agree whole heartedly. When there is time for a warning (hurricane for example), there is no excuse for anything but a safe evacuation.

If you have an hour or less like the bad old days, time to kiss the wife and kiddies goodbye.

One must remember that the Interstate highways are properly called The National Defense Interstate Highway System, as established by then President Eisenhower. As they are such vital arteries of national defense and the I-40/I-35 interchange is located 2 miles from one of the USAF's largest logistics and repair bases that also is HQ for all AWACS, I really had nowhere to run.

Now then, being prepared as my family currently is (and more so each day), if there was a chemical accident we could be gone within an hour from DFW area. That hour includes getting kids from school and getting the 5th wheel trailer hooked up to the truck.

Yeah I remember the friendly drivers and empty streets even here in Dallas/Ft.Worth. I-20 is an absolute raceway (80-90 mph average in a 60 mph zone) normally. I found myself moving along at 45 mph just listening to the radio news. Everyone seemed to be doing like me. We live just south of the final pattern for DFW Airport when ops. are to the south. The sky was so quiet.

I just cannot imagine what a mass, G.O.O.D ASAP situation would be like.

Depends on what you mean by "successful".

As messy as it seemed by many good standards the 'evacuation' of NOLA after Katrina was a success. Many were inconvenienced, some percentage were sickened or injured, and a few, fewer than most expected, died. Actual numbers of deaths were not out of line for any long weekend. Many pets and a few people were left behind but other than a few hundred everyone left and lived to tell about it.

Any major evolution of large numbers during wartime is, as a rule of thumb, expected to have a casualty rate of one percent. Most will be just injured but almost one in ten of these will be seriously injured or die.

Humans are difficult to move neatly, in many ways we herd like cats, and large migrations, particularly those done in haste, tend to get confused and messy.

Generally speaking any evacuation that gets 98% of the people out with only 2% of those moved getting injured and 0.5% dieing (mostly the very old, very young and sick) is about as good as it gets without a massive organizational effort and a lot of prepositioning of resources.

Cuba does a very good job during hurricanes. They have the entire population organized by block. Everyone is accounted for by block captains and most steps in the evacuation are planned and have been practiced.

I think I was in King County, WA's preparedness website or on one of their links about Mt. Rainier. I remember that they said that volcanoes always give warning. Somehow I doubt that is true if an (unpredicted) earthquake sets it off. Hope I'm home at the time.

Sue

I found a few different websites. The first website echoes Art's post of overall success rate in the evacuation of NOLA.

The second website paints a much darker picture of how difficult it will be to evacuate large population centers.

The third website is along the same lines as the above second website.

Finally. this Google search will provide plenty of reading on evacuating large cities.

Thats the best idea for an emergency ringtone I've heard yet. Hearing them live must've made your hair stand on end.

On 9-11 I was on Kirriemuir Golf Course, virtually all day, mapping out the golf course using GPS for the course guide with a colleague. It was a beautiful day much like in the photos on the website course guide.

http://www.kirriemuirgolfclub.co.uk/course.php

Strange thing was I could tell afterwards a few days later where I was standing exactly on the course as the GPS was time stamping my position as the events unfolded in the US. The first trade tower fell about the same time as where the photo on the Hole No 4 - Muirhouses photo was taken in virtually the same weather conditions.



We didn't finish mapping the course until well into the evening and had no idea of the events of 9-11 until we got back to the club house, which was virtually deserted accept for the bar tender. The bizarre thing was, that the TV in the bar was switched on and by then, constant news coverage was being shown, and yet even after watching the first tower being hit and the towers collapsing, it went completely ignored by myself, thinking it was some new bad Hollywood disaster Movie that was being shown. Only after my colleague returned from the bar after about 5-10 minutes with a couple of well deserved cold beers, that he had been informed by the bar tender of the terror attacks. The penny then dropped as to what I had been watching for the last 5-10 minutes.

Sometimes it can take a little while to absorb bad news or even realise it is bad news especially if you've just had a pleasant day walking a beautiful golf course.

One point to consider is that the system of emergency management are coming to a tipping point as more professionals realize that in a number of disasters and specific locations large scale evacuation is simply not practical.

Look for a slow shift toward an increasing number of plans to resort to 'sheltering in place'; targeted local evacuations, hardening of homes, and shelters, both purpose built and within select buildings (reminiscent of the old CD fallout shelter program) as a coping strategy.

The shift may not be easily seen as evacuation is still part of it. The general plan may be to evacuate the smallest practical area of direct impact. In a wider zone critical need cases and the sick and infirm would be evacuated while the remainder of the population use some combination of hardening their homes and laying in supplies or shifting to local shelters if their residences are unsuitable.

If and when the situation develops and more people need to be moved out of danger then your dealing with people who are forewarned, prepared, mobile and relatively healthy.

Yeah, if it wasn't the test day/time (Sundays @ Noon) and really nice weather you tended to take notice.

Twice I can remember there were errors in the CD/EBS system. The local broadcaster hit the Attack button instead of the "This Is A TEST" button. Half of the OKC viewing area thought TSHTF for real. The other time was a National Guard emergency mobilization drill. The genius at the state level sent the real (instead of test) code down the "phone tree". I made it from my house to the armory in record time. We actually were issuing weapons and NBC gear and waiting for the ammo to arrive before the snafu was caught.

Oddly, there was a retirement ceremony for the state AG less than a month latter.

NOLA probably would have gone much smoother if the city hadn't used their school busses for submarines and folks would have left instead of thinking "it can't happen to me".

There has been a very recent re-evaluation in the Southern California region of the system used in parts of Australia regarding wildfires--the stay-or-go policy. Either evacuate early, or stay and defend your homes. Although an evacuation-only policy has been spectacularly successful historically in terms of lives saved, considering the utter devastation of rather large swaths of some communities as we recently saw, authorities are considering ways that residents can help protect their homes. Although Southern California has huge fire fighting resources available by any measure, sometimes these fires move so quickly that they are stretched too thin in many instances.

Anyways, that topic could be a whole 'nother thread of its own.

Those were interesting, and I am finding out a lot from this thread.
I am changing my opinions rapidly here.

The big thing that still seems missing is refugee sites.

I visited a friend in Dallas in Thanksgiving of that year. At one point, I counted over 50 aircraft visible at night (landing/anti-collision lights on ). We were at one of the malls that is under the approach for DFW. Every 30 seconds a plan passed over head, either for the left or the right runway ( 1 minute separation each runway).

I honestly cannot imagine what it would sound like quiet, but I'm sure _a lot_ of people didn't sleep for the 3 days there was no air traffic.

There are really very few places in the U.S. that need to completely evacuate for hurricanes. If you're in a sturdy home outside of the flood zone you're almost certainly better off staying put than evacuating to an undetermined location.

If you have a place to go, the means to get there, and can leave early enough, evacuating isn't a horrible idea. But most people fail on most of those counts, especially with not having a plan of where to go. They end up shopping madly for a hotel and squeezing into packed shelters where they bitterly complain about only getting cold sandwiches and no cots to sleep on.

Too true Ratbert.
I doubt if most people are able to afford a month away from home without camping on a relative's place or something.
If they are told to evacuate they are likely out of a job at least until it is over (if not longer) and renting a new place to live would likely break them.

Some of the earlier comments given show that the actual evacuations are possible, with a bit of luck and a decent time frame.
But the problem of where to herd the people to seems to be missing.
Doesn't it?

Even the evacuation planners for Naples Italy, where they are living on the sides of an active volcano, gave up on that part.

Hi all - first post. Nice to meet everyone.

It depends on whether the population wants to and can evacuate, as well. Right now in Gaza, the residents can neither leave nor do they have shelters. In Israel, they have shelters but literally have no more than 10 seconds to get to them when the siren blows.

I hope that New Orleans is not the best we can do when we really do want to evacuate.

I don't have references handy but I believe China has evacuated well over a million people on several occasions for typhoons.

The major advantages they have are not so much "at gunpoint" but rather top-down organization, execution and responsibility, as well as a function railroad transport system for moving people. Also, the Lunar New Year festivities can see upwards of *100 million* people traveling - with many individual train stations used to dealing with over a million departures over a few days - so a million or two is no big deal other than inconvenient timing.

In the US evacuation planning and execution is entirely the individual state's responsibility. The federal government will provide as much help as the state will put up with, but the final decisions all rest with the state government. This can yield situations such as Katrina, where the governor did not even know she had an emergency plan, which pointed out such minor details as the fact that assisted-living facilities would need help evacuating patients.

The Katrina evacuation implemented by Louisianana amounted to asking people to figure out a way to leave on their own, which really isn't that different from how it's done anywhere else on the US coast. There simply aren't any systems here for moving large numbers of people inland other than private cars. In China they mass enormous numbers of trains in a short period, and top-down planning means the tracks will be clear and trains won't be hoarded elsewhere (here's where "at gunpoint" helps). Local organization means they know how many need transport, where they are, there's someone to count and make sure they all go, etc. And there is no arguing over individual rights when the Big Cheese says Go!

A few of the factors that have to be taken into account:

People are injured and die. The number of people injured or dead during an evacuation has to be compared to the numbers that normally die or get injured every day in your average large city.

Moving the old, very young and the sick, mental or physical, eats up a huge amount of resources and even done with utmost care will lead to suffering and some percentage dying. Losses are unavoidable.

Some percentage, usually calculated as roughly 2% to 5%, will not leave willingly the threat of fire, flood, nuclear devastation, or certain death will not shift some people. What you do with or about these people remains an open question. Do you order the police or army to go house to house removing people? Can you afford the time and manpower? Even when it means getting into possible shootouts? Even when the end result will be to put you police at risk and the end result will still that some avoid the sweeps and remain behind?

A commonly used estimate of how many people can be moved in what time is that a single open lane will carry 1000 cars per hour and each will on average carry 2.5 people:

2500 people/lane/hour.

Under near ideal conditions ten lanes will move one million people in forty hours. Toss in a few flat tires, wrecks, cars running out of gas and your numbers go down from there.

Assuming you get your million people out, where do you put them. Providing even minimum levels of food, water, shelter, sanitation, security, and medical care for one million people is a serious challenge. Evacuate NYC and you have roughly 8.3 million people on your hands.

Ah, yes, China. I forgot that they regularly evacuate hundreds of thousands due to typhoons or heavy flooding. But I don't think even the Chinese ever try to completely evacuate an area as densely populated as a million+ resident city. I think the closest they've come to that recently is the frantic evacuation after the recent large earthquake that created one or two "earthquake lakes" that threatened to burst through and flood millions downstream.

I think the consensus is that in the event of whatever, a million plus people are not going to be evacuated easily...

Is anyone surprised at that?

JohnE

It is probably getting that much harder for the Chinese to perform evacuations on a large scale as people have become wealthier and are able to afford motor cars, which are highly inefficient methods of large scale transportation during an evacution compared to the bicycle, moped, motorcycle, train or even the bus.

A search of the keywords "china evacuate million typhoon" yields many hits.

The Lunar New Year migration in China has several individual train stations seeing departures of over a million people over a few days. Change "departures" to "evacuation" and I see no reason they couldn't do a million+ population city.

The problem is translating those lessons to the US. Thanksgiving is the biggest migration in the US but I suspect there's a long period of behind-the-scenes preparation work in getting fuel & supplies pre-positioned for airplanes and cars. I doubt it would be possible to repeat that without a month or more or lead time. Ans the US doesn't have a train infrastructure that is useful for such a problem.

Well, carrying capacity is all relative to the population. Almost a million commuters travel into just Manhattan a day, but how well could they evacuate all 8 million in a short period of time? Not very well. Super-efficient Tokyo moves almost 10 million commuters a day. Even the antiquated, overloaded system in Mumbai, India moves something like 8 million commuters a day. But neither city--megacity, really--could evacuate every resident without a lot of problems since the transportation system doesn't have such massive carrying capacity.

Does anybody have more recent information on what happened to China's 5 million+ people made homeless after the Earthquakes last May.
I kind of wonder about the 197,500 they moved out of the way of The Tangjiashan earthquake greated lake.
They were making plans on moving 1.3 million people from below the lake if they had to.
They expected to be able to relay evacuation orders down through their different levels of government instead of making public announcements

I am thinking there is a lot to be learned from China but that the news died off pretty fast.

I believe they estimated at least 2 million, maybe almost 3 million Houston & surrounding area citizens evacuated Rita. Many of us seem to think that so many evacuated because it was so soon after seeing the horrors of Katrina, plus our local media over-hyped the coverage, like repeatedly playing animated surge models, maybe 2-3 times per hour -- reaching as far inland as the 610 Loop ). I was already prepared, but after watching those surge animations all day, begged hubby to evacuate about 1 1/2-2 days before landfall.

We evac'd from the south side of Houston (zone c, which is only mandatory evac for cat 4+) in our truck with dual fuel tanks. The traffic was so heavy that we would have run out of fuel had it not been for our second tank (the truck isn't the most fuel efficient).

Requests for contraflowed freeways were made for almost 24 hours before they finally arranged for them, then they took many hours to set up contraflows because of the cities along the contraflow had to have extra personnel (officers, National Guard, and State Guard) to enforce contraflow, and TxDOT's sloppy plans and implementations. But eventually, contraflow did allow us to begin moving at a continuous rate, even if it was slow for quite a while).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Rita#Texas

Other things that slowed evacuation were numerous wrecks and breakdowns. It seems like the contraflow helped with a lot of the breakdowns, which causes me to guess that many breakdowns were due to over-heating in the 100 temps. It was reported that more people died in the evacuations than in the actual hurricane, but Rita ended up hitting the Tx/La border, which isn't as densely populated as the Houston area.

There were lots of 18 wheelers, towed camping trailers and RVs that slowed things down too. I can understand wanting to bring camping trailers and RVs in case someone lost their home, or just had to stay away for at least a week or more, but those 18 wheelers certainly didn't help move traffic any faster. If it was up to me, I'd let the 18 wheelers evac 3 or 4 days before landfall, but not after mandatory evacs were ordered.

As our only calm weatherman predicted, Rita changed direction and headed towards the Tx/La border, but by that time, the citizens in Rita's path couldn't evacuate because the freeways north and west of them were parking lots. And even though Rita struck the border, she was big enough to slightly flood my area (per neighbors reports), and knock out power for a few days.

IIRC, there were hardly any problems with evacuating Ike, even though there weren't any contraflows. My guess is that people that could evac early did, and many others didn't because of how terrible Rita's evac was. Plus, Galveston waited until the last minute to declare mandatory evacuation, which might have affected Houston's evacuation had Ike become stronger.

As far as the zoned/timed evac plan, it's my opinion that it only slightly works for disasters known in advance. Our local forums had many Houstonians from the NW sides of town talking about evacuating Ike because they had children, and didn't want to be without power with children. Many people of Katy, Tx were totally freaked even though Katy is west of Houston, and pretty far inland. And with Ike, the media was much calmer than they were with Rita, due to public backlash about scaring so many people into evac'ing Rita. So that's why I think that zoned evacs will only work to a certain degree, because fear triggers flight, no matter how many people are in more danger behind them.

Flooding came within a few inches of entering my home with Ike, and did flood a few of my neighbors' homes, whose houses are a few inches lower than ours. I've been through 2 hurricanes now, but neither flooded me. I've had my home flooded twice in non-hurricane situations. One of our large trees roots became exposed after Ike, and two of our neighbor's large trees fell in our backyard. Between our four large trees surrounding this house (that's also been through Carla '61), and the realistic threat of flooding, we'll probably evacuate if we're still living in the same location. But we're thinking we'd wait until approximately 6-8 hours before landfall, after reading someone's comments after Rita, that it only took him a few hours to travel at least 100 miles by waiting until just before Rita was supposed to hit. According to his comments, if traffic was too bad, he had enough time to turn around and ride it out at home, which is what we'd do if there was still heavy traffic that close to landfall. And after TxDOT's experience with Rita, if a strong hurricane threatened the Houston area again, they'd probably do better with contraflowing with one round of contraflowing in their experience.

Welcome to the fire Shreela!

-Blast, fellow Houstonian

As Blast said, welcome!

Shreela, do you think if the authorities had jumped right onto contraflowing the freeways there would have been a worthwhile improvement?

Sue

Don't forget Susan, deciding to implement something is easy. Actually implementing something, especially something as big as contraflowing 100+ miles of freeway takes time to make happen. They had to seal exits, move jersy barriers, get police in place to direct traffic, etc. The only reason they were able to do it as fast as they did was because they had there were canes and other heavy equipment available nearby to make it happen. If they had needed to bring in the cranes from somewhere else through the blocked traffic they never would have accomplished it in time.

Since then they've rebuilt sections of the freeway to make it easy to set up a contraflow escape system.

-Blast

Hello Newperson *waves*.

The last large scale evacuation that occurred in the U.S. was during Hurricane Ike. Texas implemented an multi-modal evacuation process for both Hurricane Gustav and Hurricane Ike including an air medical evacuation system. Airports both coastal and inland were selected to become evacuation hubs:
TX Medical Evacuation Airport Hubs

DFW as evacuation hub

Any successful evacuation system will use a multi-modal approach. Contra-Flow is one part of that system. Florida has created www.onewayflorida.org for a link to their Contra-Flow plans. Click on Route Maps to see the list of routes. While contra-flow increases capacity emergency managers will not implement contra-flow immediately, as this would trap more people. The idea is that you let traffic build up on your interstate network (that's now 50% capacity ). At a critical point, you open up contra-flow. You now have 100% network capacity all leaving at one point. If it is timed correctly all traffic that was present (and a little waiting on feeder roads) would be clear of the interstate by the time tropical storm force winds come. If you did this too early, people would not feel "rushed" to get out. Evacuation from man-made disasters is different for timing and would probably have contra-flow open immediately.

The biggest problem after a mass evacuation, people want to come back, and they want to come back today. So, to help that, please choose your evacuation locations in the following order:
- Shelter In Place
- Local Evacuation
- Distant Evacuation ( Abandonment )

For an additional reference, Savannah, GA also has a contra-flow plan in place along Interstate 16.

GA Hurricane Evac Presentation - Pics & Maps

2006 Contra-Flow Workshop in Florida
http://www.teachamerica.com/ContraFlow/ContraFlow.pdf