Computers wrestle evacuation puzzle

• By AMY WOLD
• Advocate staff writer
• Published: Jun 1, 2008 - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

• Print
• Email
• Save
• Reprints
• Twitter
• Share

• Del.icio.us
• Digg
• Facebook
• Reddit
• 

With the start of another hurricane season today, thoughts should be turning to discussion of preparedness kits and evacuation plans.

However, a group of LSU researchers have made hurricane evacuations — and how to improve them — a year-round pursuit.

For two and a half years, civil engineering professor Brian Wolshon and other researchers have been working on turning a traffic-simulation model into one that can be used for hurricane evacuation planning, which is crucial for residents in south Louisiana and the Gulf Coast region.

Although the evacuation for Hurricane Katrina in 2005 was effective — estimates are that 90 percent of the New Orleans area population left before the storm — there are still some shortfalls.

“What do you do for people who can’t evacuate themselves?” Wolshon said.

That’s part of the next step in using a new computer modeling system that takes population and land use data and creates a synthetic population, he said. It may not represent a particular person in a particular house, but it’s generally representative of people who live in a certain area — how many cars they have, how many family members, where they work and more.

All of that figures in to the time it might take to evacuate a large city, such as New Orleans, during a hurricane, Wolshon said.

Currently, the computer model is being truth-tested, to see if it will provide reliable results. Researchers input conditions that existed during Katrina and then run the model to see if the results reflect what actually happened during that evacuation.

Researchers can then change the conditions and ask what would happen if there was a road closure, major accident or sudden change in storm speed.

During Katrina, there were no washouts of roads, no incidents forcing a major highway closure and no ongoing construction work. In addition, the hurricane evacuation occurred on a weekend and there was enough notice to make it all happen, Wolshon said.

“We were very fortunate with Katrina that there weren’t any incidents that closed any roads,” he said.

Also, the highway evacuation for people driving their own cars worked pretty well. “Really, there’s no real visible outcry to change it,” Wolshon said.

But just because the effort worked well last time doesn’t mean it will work well the next time, Wolshon said. If one or more of those conditions fails to fall in line, the results could be different, he said.