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Details Emerge on the New Emergency Transportation Operations (ETO) Initiative

A Discussion with Vince Pearce, Team Leader of the FHWA Emergency Transportation Operations (ETO) Team

(Last updated 12/1/04)

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The ETO Initiative is one of nine new initiatives announced by the USDOT earlier this year that are designed to leverage the potential of ITS technologies to significantly enhance transportation system operation. ETO Team Leader Vince Pearce recently discussed the ETO Initiative's objectives and significant challenges -- such as supporting evacuations from major "no-notice" events -- with ICDN Editor Jerry Werner.

ICDN: What's the rationale behind the establishment of this new ETO Initiative?

Pearce: The challenge we are facing is that there are innumerable evacuations that go on in our nation every year that are caused by all different kinds of events, such as HAZMAT incidents, wildfires, and earthquakes. Certainly, hurricane evacuations are the best known. Hurricane evacuations have been studied extensively, and we have made some major progress in the methods that are used in managing those evacuations. The challenge that remains is that many evacuations occur with no advance notice. You really don’t know when a truck carrying hazardous material is going to roll over or a wildfire will change speed or direction. Of course, we also have to keep terrorist acts in mind.

ICDN: Facilitating evacuations from what you call "no-notice events" seems somewhat similar to the process of managing special events, which is also a focus within USDOT. The key difference is the "no-notice" aspect, right?

Pearce: You have hit on a very good point. We look at "incidents" of all types on a spectrum from small to large, from typical traffic incidents and planned special events to major earthquakes or other disasters that are infrequent but massive in impact. We have been working on a set of principles with AASHTO that underpins all types of emergency transportation operations in response to these incidents. There is a commonality here between traffic incident management, planned special events, natural disasters, and the outcome of terrorist acts, which is why my team is involved in all of those areas.

ICDN: What makes this ETO effort new and novel?

Pearce: It is the no-notice aspect. For example, we know when -- or approximately when -- the Daytona 500 is going to finish next February, so we know roughly when all of those people will exit the speedway. We typically have a least 72 hours notice for a hurricane evacuation, so we have time to pre-deploy the state patrol, call up the National Guard if that is necessary, and set up contra-flow lanes if they are appropriate. The unpredictability makes the ETO effort new. It's designed to support evacuation from incidents whose scale and location you don’t know, and where multiple interacting incidents -- wildfires, flash floods, and avalanches -- may be involved.

ICDN: Can you really "plan" for no-notice incidents? That notion seems like an oxymoron, since you can't anticipate what might happen.

Pearce: You can plan for them to a certain degree. Typically, you want to assess your current infrastructure so that you can identify the weak points and take appropriate preparatory actions.

ICDN: How can you tell where the weak points are if you don’t what type of event will occur?

Pearce: Because the places where you get flash floods are also the places that have high water every time there is a rain storm. Fire fighters in California and the Southwest can tell you the locations of major brush buildups that are the most likely spots for recurring fires, and you can have preliminary plans in place. The owners and operators of nuclear power plants have been required to have very elaborate evacuation plans in place for years. So pre-planning can certainly help. However, an old phrase from the military applies here: as soon as the battle begins, the plan goes out the window. Even if you have a good plan, you need to be able to modify and manage it in real time as the event unfolds and the situation changes.

  • Phase 1 Objective: Reduce the number of evacuations and the size of those that have to take place.
  • Phase 2 Objective: Make evacuations faster, safer, and more efficient.
  • Phase 3 Objective: Finish the suite of transportation incident management standards and then field-deploy these standards in actual working system sites.

Figure 1: Objectives in the three parallel phases of the ETO Initiative

ICDN: You’ve defined three different parallel phases for the new ETO Initiative, right?

Pearce: That’s right. There are three things that we are trying to do to tackle this issue. The third one (standards) supports the other two (see Figure 1). The first phase involves what we can do to reduce the number of no-notice evacuations or minimize their size. Think about what happens if you have a HAZMAT incident, for example. The first responder on the scene, typically a firefighter or law enforcement officer, conducts a very quick assessment and makes a judgment as to how big an area to evacuate. They don’t encounter this situation every day. What if we could get better information to them and get support resources there faster and better prepared to deal with that HAZMAT incident? They should be able to call for the smallest possible precautionary evacuation, or possibly no evacuation at all. The challenge is that right now -- particularly for a HAZMAT incident -- the responder that's first on the scene has a lot to deal with. He or she will likely provide basic incident information back to his or her dispatch center, and then go about dealing with the injured and traffic at the scene. The result is that the HAZMAT dispatcher or towing and recovery company that gets called doesn’t get a ton of information about the scene. They may not know exactly what material is involved, how much is leaking, or what the traffic conditions are at the scene. If they need to absorb something off the roadway, do they need 400 pounds of dry absorbent or do they need 4 tons? It can make a big difference in how long the incident lasts.

ICDN: So how are you going to address that lack of information?

Pearce: The old cliché comes into play here: a picture is worth a thousand words. We've learned that from the Integrated Incident Management System (IIMS) project in New York City.

ICDN: IIMS involves an extensive infrastructure to provide video images from an incident scene to multiple agencies, does it not?

Pearce: It does. We want the positive outcome without the infrastructure. Today, you can buy cell phone cameras, and by the time we get things started up at the beginning of 2005 those cell phones will likely also have the capability to communicate short video clips, as well. You give those devices to the officers. They are small, light, and easy to carry and use. You ask them to shoot a little video when they get to the scene, push the button to send it back to where it gets transferred to the HAZMAT and towing people, and the officers then go about their business. It is, literally, faster than trying to describe the scene verbally to their dispatcher.

ICDN: Of course, these officers can carry such devices on their own today, so why is a new ETO initiative needed to foster such use? Wouldn't they use these devices in the normal course of their activities anyway?

Pearce: Thus far, responders aren’t instructed or trained to do this, and no simple methods exist to move the video from the responder to other responders who need it. Responders justifiably need proof of a concept before they incorporate it into their standard procedures. We want to demonstrate the effectiveness of these videophones in a real working environment. Then we can go to a Chief of Police or a State DOT Director or Fire Chief and say, "you know, we invested almost nothing in this and look at the benefits that resulted from it."

ICDN: So this phase will produce case studies and recommendations?

Pearce: Yes, but there are some technical issues that we will work out, too. For example, really strong firewalls are in place between the Internet and the law enforcement information world to protect sensitive information. Getting the incident scene pictures to other responders turns out to be an IT (information technology) challenge. It's also a bit of a challenge to get those pictures to a towing company, which is just a regular commercial firm. So we have some technical issues to work out. The great thing is that here in the Capital area we have the Capitol Wireless Integrated Network (CAPWIN) program, which is very interested in being our testbed and partner for this phase of the ETO Initiative. We are looking at kicking off this project with them probably sometime in January.

ICDN: CAPWIN already supports a communications backplane, right?

Pearce: Yes. Once they receive the video they can send it to fire houses, towing and recovery firms and all of the other responders. They’re even working on more advanced communications concepts, such as software-defined radio.

ICDN: Right now these video cameras are typically just used for phone-to-phone communication. You are talking about sending a video or snapshot back to some kind of a repository that, in turn, would dole the images out to the appropriate firms or agencies, right? Is that the concept?

Pearce: We might also post it onto a private Internet site. It’s already do-able either phone-to-phone or phone-to-web. Our challenge is to get this information routed across the appropriate firewalls and into the appropriate e-mail systems.

ICDN: How extensive a test do you anticipate?

Pearce: We will start with twenty phones, because we know there that there's going to be a learning curve. We are looking at scaling it up to perhaps a hundred phones as quickly as makes sense. We may be testing for a year or more.

ICDN: Do you anticipate that some type of new infrastructure software might be ultimately required to support video sharing among responding entities?

Pearce: We are hoping to make it easier than that, since most DOTs already have an e-mail system as an integral part of their traffic management systems. If we can accomplish this communication with the existing software technology and infrastructure, so much the better.

ICDN: Your ETO Initiative also envisions some new uses of ITS technologies for incident scene traffic control, right?

Pearce: Yes. If you think about this prototypical incident, there is a hazard at the incident scene, but there are also potential problems at the ends of the traffic queues. The incident commander has a challenge in managing an area that may extend for miles in multiple directions. Particularly under adverse weather conditions, the end of that incident-related queue can be a very dangerous place. "Secondary incidents" account for as much as 20% of all reported incidents, so if we can intelligently manage that queue we may be able to significantly reduce that figure.

ICDN: Do you anticipate issuing a "request for ideas," much like TRB might do, to discover novel uses of ITS technologies for such applications?

Pearce: We are going to talk directly with regions around the country that have active incident management programs in place. We're also planning to talk with the ITS vendor community, perhaps through ITS America, to see if they have suggestions for ways to exploit new or emerging technologies. I'll give you one example of an attractive emerging technology: I recently attended a conference here in Washington on large-scale incident response. Two companies there had VMSs (variable message signs) that fold up and go into the trunk of your vehicle. One of them folds into about a 2-foot by 2-foot area, comes with its own stand, and really does not weigh that much. It uses LEDs, so the power requirement is low. Can you imagine having three or four of those devices in the back of a cruiser or incident response truck? It might mean that the responder would no longer need to wait until portable VMS are brought from a storage yard to the scene. These devices were simple to program using remote controls very much like TV remote controls.

ICDN: So that might be an example of the type of technology or product that you explore further in the ETO effort?

Pearce: Exactly.

ICDN: The last element of your Phase One effort involves guidance on transportation’s role in biohazard emergencies. You're planning to develop that guidance in part based on "table-top exercises," right?

Pearce: That's right. It looks like biohazard situations may be the largest and maybe the most complicated HAZMAT situations imaginable. We will develop a detailed and realistic exercise scenario that describes how a situation might unfold, and then work through it at the exercise to see how involved agencies would respond. We learn many positive things from such exercises. You uncover assumptions that agencies make about each other, and sometimes those assumptions are surprising -- you know, things that staff at one agency just don’t know or understand. For example, at one workshop, agencies were discussing what they would do if one tube of a 2-tube highway tunnel were blocked. One responder stated that they could use crossovers between the two tubes in order to get their equipment through on the unblocked side. The DOT then asked if anyone there knew that one tube had 8 inches less vertical clearance than the other. Everybody was surprised. This discussion may have helped them avoid a difficult situation where both tubes might have become blocked.

ICDN: That being the case, you would need a lot of different agencies in that exercise, wouldn’t you?

Pearce: That’s the way we've conducted all of our workshops that address emergency response and recovery. We have been conducting those workshops for 3 years now, getting all of the modes of transportation involved, as well as police, fire, and EMS, emergency management, both active military and the national guard, and hospitals and the public health community. Everybody brings something to the table when you have a really complicated incident, and we are building relationships and understanding that goes a long way.

ICDN: So the overall goal of phase one of the new ETO Initiative is to reduce the size of evacuations. What's the goal for phase two?

Pearce: To manage evacuations as efficiently as possible.

ICDN: One can see where ITS and real-time data could be invaluable in supporting this goal.

Pearce: That is it exactly. To efficiently manage an evacuation, agencies need several things. First of all, they need information about what is going on. They also need a plan. They need some way to make decisions based on all that information, and they need a way to carry out those decisions. What we are talking about here sounds like ITS.

Hurricane evacuations generally take place on major routes with a higher likelihood that a significant amount of ITS -- detectors and video cameras -- is installed. For no-notice evacuations you are more likely to have people on smaller routes with which they are less familiar and that are not supported by ITS. It's usually too expensive to install typical ITS CCTV cameras on these smaller routes, especially if permanent power and communications connections are required. We are looking for alternate ways to provide such video surveillance. It doesn’t have to be fancy. It needs to be low enough cost that an agency could afford to put it out on state routes or county roads that might be used for evacuation.

ICDN: You are talking about a permanent installation?

Pearce: Yes.

ICDN: So what is your conclusion -- what technologies will payoff in this application?

Pearce: We need to study both the problem and what new products or technologies might be helpful. A lot that has gone on in the area of video has driven equipment cost and size down. Think about web cameras.

ICDN: You are talking about the $20 camera that you can hook up to your USB port and do teleconferencing with your cousin in Idaho, right?

Pearce: Yes. If that camera still cost $1,000, which it would have cost 30 years ago, it would probably be the size of a TV broadcasting camera and very few off us would have them. Because this video technology has shrunk and its cost has fallen dramatically, we may be able to apply it in some fashion to these smaller evacuation routes -- even if we're talking about slow motion or snapshots, or black-and-white. A group of TMC managers we convened to discuss disaster management last year told us that knowing anything about what is going on in that evacuation route is better than knowing nothing, and that video would be their top choice for the information they’d like to have.

ICDN: Because these cameras would need to be "weather hardened," the ultra-low-cost web cameras probably wouldn't suffice, would they?

Pearce: That is right. However, there is some interesting new technology on the market that is designed for outdoor use. For example, at the 2004 ITS America Annual Meeting, a company demonstrated a video camera at the Houston TranStar booth that fit inside the housing of a traffic signal. They were working on putting other sensors inside the signal head, as well. Their device was wireless and had a power consumption of only two watts, which means it could be solar. That starts to tell me that maybe these new video technologies are becoming practical.

ICDN: So you are talking about extending the reach of video surveillance to lesser arterials in places that are not covered by the more expensive ITS infrastructure right now. Of course, those cameras could also be of use in routine traffic incident management or emergency situations, not just major evacuations.

Pearce: Absolutely. We’re eager to achieve multiple uses of the infrastructure whenever possible.

ICDN: The TMC folks you talked with liked the idea of having a whole lot of additional eyes out in the field, but would they need to change their own infrastructure to accommodate this new information?

Pearce: Until we find out what’s available, we don’t know for sure. The whole purpose here is to see what we can do with today’s technology, and to take advantage of recent commercial developments. The next challenge is that while we may have a plan to help manage the evacuation, the chances are that the exact conditions aren’t the same as in the plan. So agencies need the ability to re-plan in real time. Think about a HAZMAT situation that creates a toxic cloud, or a wildfire that creates smoke that is obscuring visibility. As the wind shifts that cloud, an agency would need the ability to re-plan my evacuation because they don’t want to send people down a route that is going to be unusable by the time evacuees have committed to traveling on it. Conversely, the agency might want to direct people toward a route that will be clear by the time the evacuees can get to it.

ICDN: You are talking about real-time management of the evacuation?

Pearce: Actually "real-time re-planning and management." The management is still going to be carried out by the traffic management system and responders. The traffic management system is doing the reacting part. Agencies need the ability to re-plan because the situation is fluid and complex.

ICDN: What will your phase two ETO effort do to try to provide that capability?

Pearce: We are going to look at evacuation planning tools. Several tools are available today, but by and large those tools aren’t fast enough. So we are going to look at what can be done with technology that lets agencies rapidly plan and re-plan evacuation routes based on real-time input. We think that there might be some new technologies that can help out in this application. We are interested in how feasible it will be to use our dynamic traffic assignment tools. I’ve also had a briefing on the use of intelligent agent technology for comparable applications. So we think that there are some technologies out there that show the potential of helping us accomplish this re-planning very rapidly.

ICDN: You are talking about new tools that would typically operate in the TMC?

Pearce: That would be the objective, yes. We would like it there in the traffic management environment so that it is integrated with the traffic management system.

ICDN: Do you envision some kind of graphical tool that would show the prescribed and alternate evacuation routes and somehow alert the operator when a change of strategy is needed?

Pearce: Exactly.

ICDN: And that tool does not exist today?

Pearce: No, we know of nothing available today that does this re-planning fast enough.

ICDN: Will you be developing this tool as part of the ETO Initiative?

Pearce: We hope to, yes. We are not going to invent new modeling technology, but we think that some novel existing modeling technologies can be applied to this particular problem.

ICDN: When is that part of the Initiative kicking off?

Pearce: We are just starting to kick off the first projects. The first project, a state-of-the-practice assessment on no-notice evacuations, kicked off on the fifth of November. Booz Allen Hamilton is the prime contractor. We hope to kick off the low-cost surveillance project in a few weeks.

ICDN: That is the project to investigate low-cost Internet-compatible cameras?

Pearce: Yes. We're also investigating the possibility of having the "intelligent vehicle" provide probe information on smaller arterial and county routes that are not currently well instrumented. We are working on several tasks with the VII (Vehicle Infrastructure Integration) program to see if vehicle probes might be able to tell us what's going on in evacuation routes.

ICDN: Does phase two of the ETO Initiative involve any other activities?

Pearce: The last piece involves influencing traveler behavior, once the agency has made the decision as to what needs to be done. Traveler information technologies, including variable message signs (VMS), highway advisory radio, 511, and websites have a great potential for influencing evacuee behavior. There are a lot of tools that could be used to give more detailed route specific information than, for example, an evacuee can get on normal radio and TV broadcasts. The challenge, however, is that the message an agency would be trying to deliver is longer and more complex than your day-to-day traffic congestion message. Agencies don’t want to try to delivery 12 lines of text on a VMS. That would be a pretty hazardous thing to do. We’ve also been approached by commercial sector through ITS America’s Public Safety Advisory Group about how Onstar ™ and XM Radio ™ might be able to help communicate important information to evacuees.

ICDN: I presume that because of the message complexity, you therefore need to dole out traveler information in some kind of a hierarchical way, saying, "go here to find more information."

Pearce: We know, for example, that many evacuees will be looking for available shelter space, specific kinds of shelters, or locations that will accept pets. First of all, we have to understand what type of information needs to be delivered to evacuees. Then we need to figure out how to adapt that information to the information delivery tools that are available. James Pol in the USDOT ITS Joint Program Office is going to be heading up a project to do just that.

ICDN: You mentioned earlier that standards are the focus of the third and final phase of the ETO Initiative, right?

Pearce: In order to share all this information about the condition of evacuation routes and the actions that are being taken, we need to finish our information management standards and we need to deploy those standards. That is the focus of the third phase.

ICDN: Are you talking about the IEEE 1512 family of incident management standards?

Pearce: 1512 and all of the related standards. We have identified eight key standards, some of which are completed and some of which need to be finished. Once the initial development work is done, we want to deploy all of these standards in actual field sites, document those deployment and operations experiences, and provide feedback to other potential deployers and to the standards development process. Our goal is to ultimately be able to say "If you are ready to implement incident management standards at your site, we have guidance for you that will make that process a lot less difficult."

ICDN: Is the shepherding of those standards moving from the ITS JPO to the FHWA's Office of Operations?

Pearce: No. We are funding the completion and demonstration of these standards through the ITS JPO-funded ETO initiative, so we are in some sense the owners of these standards, but the work will be jointly managed by Lee Simmons in the Joint Program Office and Tom Stout here in the Office of Operations. Lee is responsible for finishing the development and Tom is responsible for the deployment.

ICDN: Do you anticipate the need for any new standards, or do you think the currently defined set meets the ETO needs?

Pearce: From what we can tell, there are plenty of standards out there to get the job done. We just need to get everything finished and working well together.

ICDN: Will you be doing anything to accelerate recent plans for the completion and testing of these standards?

Pearce: Yes, that is part of our objective. We are looking right now at how quickly we can get things finished up and start doing some fieldwork. We also need to work with other agencies. We, in transportation, aren’t the only folks who have been tackling this standards issue. The folks over in public safety, and specifically the U.S. Department of Justice, have done some fantastic work on public safety information standards. Both their standards and ours mutually cover some very important territory, particularly information about incidents. The challenge is how we integrate their standards-compliant dispatch systems with our standards-compliant ITS systems. We may call a particular piece of data "X" where they call it "Y," and it takes awhile to figure out just what data we have in common. We plan to cross-reference those standards to make that integration as easy as possible. The agencies in Salt Lake City and Seattle, who are spearheading TMC-CAD integration field operational tests, are pioneers in this effort.

ICDN: In addition to working with the USDOJ, are other parts of the USDOT involved in this ETO Initiative with the FHWA?

Pearce: Absolutely. There is a specific focus in the ETO initiative to be multi-modal. If you think about it, in the simplest sense, how do I move the most people during an evacuation? It may involve moving them by bus or train or truck rather than moving them in their individual cars. So we have a steering committee for this Initiative made up of representatives from all of the modes and the Office of the Secretary. We tap into their thinking about the role of the different modes in evacuations. There is tremendous interest. The folks up at NHTSA, who are the USDOT interface to the emergency medical community, are vigorously involved, as are two different parts of the Federal Transit Administration. We've also seen great interest from the Federal Railroad Administration. There is a tremendous amount of support for this topic.

We’re also coordinating with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). For several years, we’ve worked with FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) on hurricane evacuation. The DHS Office of Domestic Preparedness, which is tasked with establishing national preparedness standards, is interested in our work, as is the U.S. Citizen Corps., which is managed from within DHS. We’ll continue to coordinate with ITS America’s Public Safety Advisory Group and the National Traffic Incident Management Coalition, which include representatives of a broad range of public safety agencies.

We have strong academic ties as well, such as with the Natural Hazards Research and Application Information Center at the University of Colorado in Boulder, the Hurricane Center at Louisiana State University, and the University of Maryland, which is both a key CAPWIN partner and which is doing additional research for us on optimizing traffic signal timing to facilitate evacuation and responder ingress. We work closely with AASHTO’s Special Committee on Transportation Security (SCOTS) and the TRB Critical Infrastructure Protection Committee and Subcommittee on Evacuation, which is chaired by Brian Wolshon from LSU. ITE, which also has a strong interest in evacuation and response/recovery, is also involved through its Security and Evacuation Advisory Committee, which is chaired by Pat Noyes. I know I haven’t mentioned all of our partners, but I think you can see that stakeholder outreach and input is very important to this Initiative.

Vince Pearce can be reached at Vince.Pearce@fhwa.dot.gov

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