Officials rework evacuation strategy

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PREPARING FOR THE WORST

Officials rework evacuation strategy
By Mark Schleifstein Staff writer

Tuesday, May 31, 2005

With the six-month hurricane season opening Wednesday, local emergency planners are fine-tuning evacuation plans, including changes to last year's rage-inducing scheme to use both sides of the interstate and a new effort to bus thousands of people without personal transportation out of New Orleans.

And with another busy season predicted, national hurricane experts say they will release more information this year, partly because they're hoping to encourage evacuation or precautions sooner, and partly because they'll have more data from a new automated reporting system throughout the Gulf of Mexico.

"I can't emphasize enough how concerned I am with southeast Louisiana because of its unique characteristics, its complex levee system," National Hurricane Center Director Max Mayfield said. "I know I've said this before, but the potential for a large loss of life from a hurricane is greater in southeast Louisiana than anywhere else on the Gulf Coast."

The local changes are meant to improve on a less-than-satisfactory evacuation response across the New Orleans area last year when a powerful Hurricane Ivan was bearing down on the city. It swerved and crashed ashore at the Alabama-Florida border, wiping away homes and condominiums and causing hundreds of millions of dollars in damage, some of which still hasn't been repaired.

In what ended up being a frustrating move last year for emergency planners and evacuees alike, drivers were allowed to use both sides of Interstate 10 to go west. But a number of glitches conspired to make the 90-mile drive to Baton Rouge take up to 10 hours. At times, Ivan was moving faster than traffic on the interstate.

Under this year's plan, the number of lanes on major traffic arteries out of the New Orleans area will increase from eight to 11. All lanes of Interstate 10 in East Jefferson will go westbound beginning at Clearview Parkway in Metairie, instead of at Loyola Drive in Kenner five miles farther west. Most westbound travel on Interstate 12 in St. Tammany Parish will be prohibited. To the north of I-12, all lanes of I-55 and I-59 will carry evacuees north into Mississippi.

In addition, state workers will restripe the northbound I-10 bridge from Irish Bayou to Slidell so evacuees will have three outbound lanes across Lake Pontchartrain.

Evacuees will need to plan ahead, because where they enter the interstate and which bridge they use will determine where they end up.

The plan calls for a four-phase evacuation beginning 50 hours before tropical storm-force winds are expected to hit the Louisiana coast. First out would be residents south of the Intracoastal Waterway, including residents of the Lower 9th Ward of New Orleans and the east bank of the Mississippi River in St. Bernard and Plaquemines parishes. At 40 hours, the West Bank would be evacuated. At 30 hours, contraflow restrictions will kick in and the east bank of New Orleans and East Jefferson would be urged to evacuate. Contraflow would end six hours before the storm makes landfall.

Maps showing the details of the contraflow plan should be issued by the state in June, officials said.


Busing planned


The busing evacuation plan is a work in progress. Details likely will remain murky until time to implement the plan, because officials don't want people heading to a particular place expecting a ride. Those without transportation need to be planning now how they'll get to safety, New Orleans Emergency Preparedness Director Joseph Matthews said.

"It's important to emphasize that we just don't have the resources to take everybody out," Matthews said.

He said the viability of the bus plan depends on whether Regional Transit Authority and New Orleans public school officials find enough volunteer drivers.

New Orleans is in an unusual situation, compared with neighboring parishes, because more than a quarter of its residents have no personal transportation. According to the most recent census data, about 134,000 out of the city's 480,000 people are without cars, said Shirley Laska, director of the University of New Orleans' Center for Hazards Assessment, Response & Technology.

If the buses are used, Matthews said those on board will have to be patient.

"Lets face it," he said. "In time of an emergency, if we wait until the new contraflow plan is put in effect to begin this plan, it will take anywhere from four to six hours to get people as far as Baton Rouge.

"And we have to arrange for things as simple as finding strategic points along the route for bathrooms and water, for security and medical personnel to accompany the convoy in case of medical needs."

Matthews said the plan is to take people from 10 pickup points throughout the city to one or more shelters north of Interstate 12.

City officials also are cooperating with the American Red Cross, Total Community Action and the University of New Orleans in developing a faith-based hurricane response system that includes a buddy system for evacuation.

Operation Brother's Keeper, financed with a grant from the Baptist Community Ministries, is aimed at assisting religious institutions in both preparing for a hurricane and in finding ways to pair with other religious institutions north of the lake to provide transportation and shelter.

There are four pilot churches this year, with a goal of providing assistance to about 2,000 residents.

Red Cross officials recommend that families put together emergency kits including personal financial information, flashlights, first-aid kits, medicines and other supplies, which can be used during evacuations or during other non-hurricane emergencies.


Stormy weather


The National Hurricane Center predicted this month there would be 12 to 15 tropical storms this season, with seven to nine becoming hurricanes and three to five becoming major hurricanes.

Mayfield, the Hurricane Center's director, said a new experimental forecasting product being rolled out by the center this year should help emergency preparedness officials in making decisions on evacuations.

The center will publish a map and a written statement with the probability of 35 mph, 58 mph and 75 mph or greater winds occuring in areas along a storm's forecast path.

"Emergency managers can take the product and go to their local officials and say there's a 20 percent probability of being hit by hurricane-force winds, and that might be enough to convince them to take action," Mayfield said.

Such products are usually tested for a year or two before being made a permanent part of the national hurricane forecasting array, he said.

Local National Weather Service forecast offices also will be issuing local inland hurricane statements and will place more emphasis on them, Mayfield said.

That effort is aimed at getting people in shoreline areas, such as along Florida's coast, to evacuate to the closest inland location available to avoid inland flooding, he said.

Hurricane researchers and emergency preparedness officials also could begin benefiting this year from a growing national and worldwide observing system, which includes buoys and other observation points in the Gulf of Mexico and along the coast.

Speaking at the American Geophysical Union's Joint Assembly last week, a gathering of four international earth and space science organizations, Landry Bernard of the National Data Buoy Center at Stennis Space Center said efforts are under way to create a $30 million-a-year observation program in the Gulf by 2011.

Information from the beginnings of that system already has helped researchers understand how a combination of storm surge and wind-driven waves damaged or destroyed stretches of Interstate 10 bridges over Alabama's Mobile Bay and Florida's Pensacola Bay during Hurricane Ivan last year.

Several decks were knocked off their piers by a surge of 12 feet combined with locally generated waves of 6 ½ feet to 10 feet, said Jim Chen, a researcher with the Coastal Transportation Engineering Research and Education Center at the University of South Alabama.

Such information is expected to be useful in designing improvements to bridges all along I-10 in the Gulf region, he said.

New data also will be available this year about the underwater effects of hurricanes that pass across offshore oil rigs, thanks to new Minerals Management Service rules.

The federal agency, which regulates oil production in federal waters, now requires each platform to measure underwater currents from a few feet below the surface to a rig's bottom, and to report it every 20 minutes to the buoy center at Stennis, said Don Conlee, who runs the collection program.

He said there already are 20 companies participating in the new database. The information will be available for a variety of users, including the National Hurricane Center, which could use it in hurricane prediction models.

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Mark Schleifstein can be reached at mschleifstein@timespicayune.com or (504) 826-3327.