3.2 Recommendations for Best Practices

• Be sure to pre-plan.

• Have intelligent, motivated, and dedicated staff that are very familiar with the plan and its goals.

• Emphasize the need to educate the general public on evacuation procedures, especially if located in an area where evacuations do not occur often.

• Provide back-up power to essential traffic operations devices such as traffic signals and ITS devices in case of power loss following an event.
  

• When conducting exercises and training for emergency evacuations, no matter what the size, be sure to include every agency identified in the plan so that everyone is aware of what they need to do and where they need to be during an emergency event.

• Regional emergency agency response should not rely solely on transit agencies to evacuate the public. The responsibilities of transit agencies should be to maintain normal transit operation and assist in evacuating those with special needs. The emergency coordination agency should consider available “surge” transportation resources such as school bus fleets and operating companies that would be idle during the emergency period.

• It is very important to develop a nationwide real-time emergency traffic management system that applies surveillance technologies to provide real-time evacuation information to all participating agencies. FHWA should adopt this strategy nationally for all types of disaster response and large-scale event management.

June 26, 2006
Publication #FHWA-HOP-08-016