Thank you. Good afternoon, everybody, and thanks for joining us. Our first speaker is Tom Lambert, the Vice President and Chief of Police for the Metropolitan in Houston, Texas. In this capacity, Mr. Lambert is responsibility for directing and managing Metro's police and traffic management department which includes overall police operations, traffic management activities, high occupancy vehicle lane operations and management, and Homeland Security and Emergency Management project. Prior to joining Metro, he served at senior police officer with the Austin, Texas, Police Department. Mr. Lambert hold a bachelor of arts degree in political science from Southwest Texas State University, and masters in public administration from the University of Houston. He is vice chairman of the Intelligent Transportation System, ITS, America's Board of Directors -- excuse me. Anyway, if you will join us in welcoming Mr. Lambert. Tom? Thanks. If you will, let's imagine that your community within a matter of three days has increased the population of about 250,000 individuals. Let's imagine that your community has come together with open arms and is building infrastructure to support those new residents in your community coming from an area where they have been under disaster conditions, and are looking for warmth, care, and you have to set you have an infrastructure to operate. Then let's imagine in 20 days after receiving your new colleagues, your knew community members, you are being confronted with a circumstance where perhaps a hurricane 5, category 5 hurricane is approaching your community, and you begin to look at how do you transition from serving those coming to your communicate any in the support role to engaging in emergency operations and how you evacuate your community, and working with all the partners you worked with for years and table talk exercises, and how you work together at the regional transportation emergency management center to really focus in now serving those needs of the folks and getting out of this community, and engaging in America operations. We are going to talk about -- emergency operation. We will talk about that when the Houston region became home to 250 thousand individuals that had to be evacuated from the New Orleans area as a resort of Hurricane Katrina. We will talk about 20 days later, how we had to transition to evacuate from 1.7 to 2.5 million individuals leaving the Houston region as a result of not having the concern of hurricane 5, category 5 approaching our community, and the lessons we've learned through the strength of a great partnership that's been established through Houston TranStar Regional Transit, and how we've used multiple professions to serve the the needs of this community in a partnership, and we will talk about that. We will talk from the perspective of a regional transportation agency, agency that has a role in public transportation, evacuation, role that has a policing role -- role that has a broader role in traffic management working with partners in the region. But we are going to talk about two events back to back. What was Metro's role, Houston Metro's Regional Transportation Agency's role to move New Orleans evacuees into Houston for safety, and shelter, and how we then had to transition into a role of helping to serve with our partners evacuating folks from the Houston region when Hurricane Katrina approached us. We are will talk about all the tabletop exercises that we worked together annually through emergency preparedness exercises and hurricane, and how we used the National Instant Management System in putting it into action, and we'll talk about some on-the-job training because we never experienced anything that we experienced with the events of Katrina and Rita, and how Metro operations and police staff worked together in an unified command that was put together at Reliant Park, that and the Superdome, and we had to set up an infrastructure working with the private and company partners to set up transportation for law enforcement, for health services, medical, for those things that assisted people in getting their needs met during the time they had to transition, and we'll talk about had we had to change from moving New Orleans evacuees in and around that complex to meet their needs with retail, government assistance, working with the federal partners, our state partners in making those services available to them. We'll talk about partnerships. And any time you get into a partnership and you have very well developed plans and experts that have spent a lot of time to do that, the real engagement of making sure they are successful is how the partners come together, and making sure you know each other before you have to engage in serving the operations and suffering the community so the day of the emergency, that's not the first time you begin to meet people, and making sure it's important to have transportation, how transportation and law enforcement works together in serving that need. We really understood going into the Katrina examiner that because of the demands that would be placed on our system, we wanted to do that if we set the requests were coming that there were needs to assist people with public transportation, and if there requests came in for ten bust or less, the operations folks working at the joint operations center, Reliant Park, they had the authority to make those decisions. As we got into situations where we saw the need for over 10 buses, or if we'd go outside the established metro service area, then we pushed that decision tree up to the coordinated operations center at Houston TranStar Regional Transportation Emergency Management Center to make sure there was a clearly coordinated communication structure that we knew where all our resources were, and how we were making sure we would show the community, how things were changing as we were meeting the sport needs of people coming for entertainment. How we used vehicle technology, to track equipment, how we used different modes of vehicles to serve the internal shelter operation that was set up at Reliant Park to serve the residents there, and the multi-vehicles we used to serve the region to make sure we got people where they needed to go in an orderly fashion. We then saw on Tuesday, September 20th, we were getting weather forecasts we had hurricane Rita approaching and we began to shift how we made plans to evacuate the city, something we had never done. Forty-eight hours out, we saw a forecast that said the track of hurricane Rita was a category 5, 175 miles per hour, it would have a water surge coming up the Houston Ship Channel the 25-30 feet. I think the effect of that would have been about a million individuals in that area of water surge, and we had to begin working with our partners to make sure that we used the plans, that we had established that we had trained to, that we had worked together to make sure we implemented those plans. Also the recognition that we had to learn some lessons because as you get into the operations, a good plan is one that is flexible, that you can adapt based upon changing circumstances, and that's really what we got into through the unified command structure at Houston TranStar. during hurricane Rita. Houston TranStar is our regional transportation and emergency management center in the Houston region. It's a partnership between Department of Transportation, the City of Houston -- Harris county, and we worked together day-to-day in how we are serving the transportation needs, information needs to get people traveling through the community. But when it comes to times of emergency, the same systems we use daily to manage traffic are the same ones we use to manage how we can use technology to assist people trying to do the right job, trying to do a good job in serving the community. We had partnerships with the TranStar partners, worked with the governor's division of urgency management. National Weather service which was critical. All the law enforcement agencies in the region supported our activities, we worked with transit systems not only our system, but surrounding areas to make sure we brought all the resources to bear, and operated under an unified command structure to make sure decisions were made jointly, we had the same understanding of what we had to deliver and how we were supporting each other. We recognized that as an operating agency, we had to make sure that our services were in such order that we could serve the needs of the community, while recognizing that first and for most, we had to meet the needs of our employees. Our employees are the ones that we were asking to serve the community, we needed to make sure that they took care of their families before we engaged them in making sure they could pay all attention to support the needs of the community, but we wanted to make sure we discontinued service at the right time so we didn't have vehicles exposed, and having enough resources to bring to assist with evacuations. So our president and chief executive officer said we would suspend bus service on Thursday, a day prior to the arrival, and we had a 7.5-mile light rail system that operated to 9:00, and we discontinued that on Thursday, and we suspended all services on Friday and Saturday during the times when we anticipated the worst experience we would get from this storm. We then wanted to make sure that as we were prepared to come back with operations, we looked at a strategy of critical routes that would serve critical needs, critical facilities, they would come on line first, and we move to make sure we had a plan implementing all the normal services, structured in the community's plan return and response to how we would get people back to their normal days and normalized in this community. Unified command cannot be emphasized enough in a operating government. Sheriff's department, Houston Police Department, Texas Department of Public Safety, all the law enforcement agencies working together, Department of Transportation played a role in supporting not only how we used the existing infrastructure in that movement of people, but how to use the ITS technology that they have been leaders in I am letting the camera systems, the real freeway speed maps where we helped move people around. The Red Cross, Salvation Army had, played a critical role in meeting the needs of the community while evacuations were going on. Making sure that we had a joint news media information center so information communicated to the media who did a tremendous job, to give them information that would make them make informed decisions during the times, and then the champion, leadership elected leaders, mayor of the city, and Harris County Judge who is our administrative judge, and their partnership in working together to make sure we had an unified structured's approach on how to meet those needs. We used the dynamic message signs -- the traveling information systems that we have, time with the private traffic services to communicate back to their media outlets to make sure we were getting accurate information on real-time conditions of what was taking place to benefit that movement. We wanted to make sure the emergency operations center and staffs of police, emergency management, transportation professionals, all working together, working in concert, and how we were getting information, sharing information using the information, making sure we were doing the right things, and again, making sure folks that had worked together before we had this emergency were engaged, understanding the roles we played and how we needed to adapt to make sure we were prepared to serve the community needs. We made sure we had an operations center focussed on how we were getting bus service, looking at mitigating the impact of our own facility, how we developed our on continuity of operations plans, how we had engaged the transportation role that we had a responsibility under the City of Houston emergency management plan, and how that plan expanded based upon real-life experiences we were confronted during hurricane Rita, And then the impact on buses, taxi cabs, everybody that had a role to support in this assistance we got from the Governor's Division to bring additional vehicles to us and how we had to look at an expands region, not just Harris County, but a eight-county region, how we supported our friends and colleagues in Galveston to assist in evacuating. How we got assistance from Amtrak by sending us trains, and colleagues in Dallas and Fort Worth by sending us Trinity Railroad Trains to help us move individuals out of Galveston and out of Houston. How we worked with -- to make sure we had 500 of our busses, 500 private carriers, transporting more than 20,000 people to shelters that were set up throughout the region outside of evacuation area and got the, how we use buses, police officers, 350 community volunteers handing out 45,000 bottles of water to individuals that are stranded on area freeways at the peak of the evacuation. How we worked with our colleagues at TxDOT, the Governor's office, the city, the county, law enforcement community to implement contraflow operations once the decision was made to do so, and how we made sure we had an operational component of all the regional partners serving the last week to make sure we got motorists into shelter locations, how we worked to deliver fuel, not only to our vehicles when it's critical to have fuel, but assisting emergency responders and private carriers that needed fuel, and how we looked at both getting folks back from long and short term trips back to the community. Private carriers, our own buses working with the Red Cross and serving the needs of this community, school buses, making sure that not only we had the buses but the district had the drivers to support that operation. Making sure those with special needs working with the EMS community, how we supported their needs and getting them to the locations they needed and the care they needed, using the para-transit vehicles. The railroad service, using that to move people out of our area through multiple modes of conveyance. How we then looked at the evacuation plans and we have a great system in Houston, and Harris County, we knew what was going on through the ITS technology, but outside the region began to see, only through helicopters, because the system stopped working out. And that was the means on how, how things were working. The look that we were seeing, decisions wee had to make because, again, we had never experienced this, we had all worked together to come up with decisions that would help us move this traffic, lead to us a point of saying we've got to make sure that we've got an evacuation route and we utilized contraflow operations that worked through very hard people, putting things in place to make last minute divisions decisions. That this is what a Houston freeway looked like at 2:00 a.m., and that was done through the media, professionals working together to accomplish this, and we then had to begin how we were going to prepare and restore operations to meet the needs of the folks coming back, and fuel is critical. Not only to transit system, emergency responders and how we were working to make sure we had fuel supplies to keep operations going, and I never thought I would get in business with working with my staff to begin to escort fuel trucks, but that's what we had to do, make sure we were getting fuel through the assistance of emergency management partners, getting the tankers that we escorted to make sure we had fuel, and then we had to make sure we did the right thing of talking to each other, although we may have different system working, whether its voice, data, radio, we had a shared communications process. That included our leaders, raising funds to get the needs we needed to get to folks and help them after we got back through the storm and supporting their needs after Katrina, then after Rita, and the fund-raising, and then you always have to understand lessons learned so as the MasterCard Commercial says," wood to board up windows, $100, supplies, $200, not being stuck on Houston Freeways, that's priceless." Thank you, Linda. You're welcome. Thank you. Doctor Wilson -- Associate Professor of civil and environmental engineering. He is one after handful of nationally recognized research leaders in the feel of evacuation, and major event traffic operations in 2004, he served at consult that attendant to Louisiana Hurricane Task Force which developed a regional arterial roadway evacuation plan. Over the past several years, doctor Wilson has authored dozens of technical papers and has given presentations related to evacuation and use of contraflow and reverse able flow traffic lines. he directs the effort to create a national focal point for the dissemination of transportation based evacuation research information. He has served on numerous regional and national committees on subjects related to evacuation traffic operations. Doctor Wilson? Thank you. Can you hear me? Good. There's a bunch of things that I'd like to say and talk about, but what I'm going to try to do is focus the discussion specifically on the, I guess the transition from what we saw in hurricane Ivan to what we saw in hurricane Katrina here in Louisiana. What I want to talk about, I need to start with what happened in Ivan and the process that kind of led up to the Ivan plan, and what was done to improve it. And then what the effects of those improvements were, changes were, positive and negative. Talk about some other broader issues, lessons learned and research that we've been doing here at LSU, and as I go through my presentation, I'll try to sprinkle in what I'm starting to call Brian's Rules of Evacuation. Having kind of studied this topic for almost going on ten years now, I'm seeing a lot of things that in fact each watching some questions that pop up, everybody seems to ask a lot of the same questions, and there's a lot of opportunity, I think, for maybe some kind of guide or checklist or whatever that could be developed so that we're not repeating a lot of these same mistakes, and not having to learn the same hard lessons over and over. What, what you are looking at now, is a map of the basically the New Orleans metropolitan area If you look, New Orleans is, as you've seen, is surrounded by water on all sides, and even though it looks like it's dry land, it's actually, you know, maybe a foot or so above the water, and in a lot of cases here, where I'm moving my pointer, there's are the flooded areas in the 9th Ward that are below sea level, so the problem is there's not a lot of places to shelter people, so the plan that was developed in 2000 was to actually implement contraflow on a segment of I-10 coming out of the city, and heading west. If you go further to the west on I-10, you go to Baton Rouge, if you take I-55 north, you end up crossing or intersecting I-12, you can take that to Jackson. The other route across the water was the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway, and I-10 going to the east that you could access I-59 that would head you to Mississippi. This was developed in 2000 by the Louisiana State Police, with a little bit of input from the Louisiana Department of Transportation. And I'll get to some problems of what we saw. One of the, four problems, four biggest problems that were seen were over reliance on the western movement of traffic, if I go back to the slide that shows this area, what we tend to see is people moving to areas to the west, and that's not surprising because there's a lot of areas, most of the state of Louisiana to the west, you have Baton Rouge, Lafayette, Houston, Dallas, lots of designations with a lot of hotel rooms and relatives. And there's a confluence or congestion created by the confluence of interstate routes. I'll go back to where we were crossing primary evacuation routes. Here, up by I-12 and Lake Pontchartrain Causeway, in this area by I-10, I-12, I-59, definitely up I-55, and I-12, and the worst area was Baton Rouge, and I'll show you that in a minute. We also had a contraflow. We learned a lot. Then another major problem was the inability of evacuees to access kind of real-time information so they could make routing decisions, and I'll discuss that a little bit, too. If we look at what happened in Ivan, these are the regional traffic volumes, and you can see the direction of traffic and some of the, all of volumes that are shown. The key thing is how many people were moving in this direction from New Orleans up to, towards Baton Rouge. We had some people who were moving north, but this traffic that you see coming into Baton Rouge was a lots of coastal areas of Alabama, even, we had evacuees from Pensacola, throughout coastal Mississippi, and that was coming towards the east, and that was something that we had to, we had to address. Now, if we look at the contraflow loading issues, if you look how contraflow is loaded in New Orleans, it's done by a cross-over from the normal outbound lanes using inbound lanes, the New Orleans Contraflow Plan that was on the books for Ivan was actually a very short section about 20 miles long that would extend across or over what we call the "Bone Terry Spillway" section and most of our freeways are utilized. The problem that we saw was that at this contraflow cross over point, even though you had three lanes of traffic that was heading into four beyond the cross-over, the problem was that this traffic control in the vicinity of this cross over was causing congestion up stream. So it's a classic both next situation where the congestion occurs prior to the cross over, and once you got past that, if you look where my cursor is, it's wide open, and there was a wide open movement of traffic, and we didn't have any congestion there. In New Orleans, what we were doing is we were trapping people within that bowl or that area, the protected levees, which was important where we wanted to get people out. If we look quantitatively at what was going on, and this graph shows that point, or traffic data that was collected at that point, if we look on the, I believe this was Monday, we had basically the morning rush and afternoon rush, and evacuation really didn't start until early in the morning on Tuesday, and what you see is that volume rapidly went up until basically it peaked and then we had a crash. This is when the congestion started, and there was no contraflow for several hours, in fact, you can see here when contraflow was started. So what you see is a crash in the speeds, and crash in volume. So the volume went from about maybe 3800 vehicles per hour in all three lanes down to somewhere under 2000, maybe 1800. Then once contraflow was started, if you notice, we had an increase in the flow, the speeds that were low, but we never were able to really regain that lost capacity or that ability to get those evacuees out, then you, when the evacuation starts, this is kind of the nighttime, and then you see morning, it gets going again, then it ebbs away. The good thing was that the storm never made landfall in Louisiana. The bad thing is did make landfall near Mobile, but the interesting thing was that a lot of people called that evacuation a success, they said look, we were able to get everybody who wanted to get out or had the ability to get out, we got them out, but from a traffic engineering perspective, we saw problems with travel, travel time, lots of congestion and delays, and that's something we don't like. If we look at what was going on in Baton Rouge, we had kind of a similar situation where -- this is at the crossing of the Mississippi River, this is after the confluence where we can get an idea of that bubble of traffic that came through the city, and basically that period lasted about 48 hours, now, that effectivity meant that Baton Rouge was paralyzed. It was very little ability during Ivan for people to get from one side of the city to other. You say well, why would people be out during an evacuation? It's business as usual in Baton Rouge the university didn't close until Wednesday, and people still had to get to work, people were taking kids to school, but they couldn't use the freeways and they had a lot of trouble using any of the major arterial routes as well. And I'll talk about the ram indications of that in a little bit. The proposed solutions that were suggested was to maximize availability, available routes out of New Orleans, now, if you go back to that map of New Orleans, you see that in this area of a million and a half people, you only have about maybe six or eight really high capacity arterial routes out, including the freeways, so we have to try to maximize those as much as we can. We wanted to mitigate or eliminate the situation, and I'll show you some suggestions that were put forward to do that. Some of them were taken, some weren't. We want to have a more loading, I meant we wanted to increase the ability to get that information out to evacuees. Now, if we can to New Orleans, what we did is the Louisiana Evacuation Task Force was formed as a joint task force between the Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development, and Louisiana State Police. And at that point, they asked me if I could get involved and bring some lessons that I've seen learned in other places from some of our studies, and some of the results of our research. And then that, the horsepower for a lot of our ideas was pride by two consultants who went through and developed the models and ran the models and was able to produce that out about put date attachment if you look, this is kind of output data. In Ivan, without contraflow, basically what we would be able to get was a 12-hour flow out and when I talk about flow out, I'm talking about cross this section here. It looks like it's over dry land, it's not; It's over water. And this is basically the constraining segment. There are two lanes in each direction over this segment of roadway. And without contraflow, we get about 50,000 vehicles out during a 12-hour time period. And if we look at that in terms of number of evacuees the occupancy rate of 2.5 people in a vehicle, we are talking 123,000 people. With contraflow, that would be increased to about 67,000 vehicles, or about 168,000 people, so we get, we see about a 36% increase or benefit from the use of contraflow. The reason why this is important is that there are still a lot of people who I talked to who think it's a bad idea. Lots of people I talk to think it's confusing, it's dangerous, think it doesn't work, and they think they can't do it. I think those people are wrong and I think that, well, I'll stop right there. Then what we did with some models, we suggested instead of loading contraflow at a single point, right here in the City of Kenner, that we load it at multiple points, and stretch it back into the city, and the reason why that is so important was because with that single cross-over, you are causing congestion from the control, and what you want to try to do, you are dealing with demand that far exceed the capacity, try to spread that demand as much as you can, either temporally or especially. Implementing it is a different settle of issues. Through the modeling, we found that by adding multiple loading points, what we did is we didn't increase any capacity down here, but we were able to fully utilize the capacity in this downstream section to the point where we could nearly double the amount of vehicles that could get out. And that's what was used during Katrina. This is is the, one of the issues of Katrina was the, of Ivan was the confluence congestion created in Baton Rouge, and what could we do about it, and they talked about extending contraflow to Baton Rouge. Contraflow is -- the immediate segment will never operate fully unless you are loading and unloading it properly. If you don't load it properly, it runs under utilized. And then if you under load it improperly, you extend your point of congestion further downstream, so what was suggested at one point was actually to run contraflow for short segment through Baton Rouge. Whereby I-12 traffic would pass through, and I-10, would run through Baton Rouge in a contraflow fashion, be routed north or on parallel routes further to the east. By doing that, not only was the congestion lessened, it was flat-out eliminated. This was no congestion, in a configure like this, you never allow those that, the four lanes that come together into two. But, what ended up being implemented, was a more aggressive management plan than what I just talked about. They extended the contraflow routes, so that the people exiting the city would exit to the east, and anybody coming westbound on I-10 from Florida, from Alabama, from Mississippi they would the no be allowed to drive through Louisiana. Those folks would have to turn north on to I-59, not necessarily going the same place they were, but this will help people to go in a fortunately direction and set up trying to go west and creating more congestion. The Lake Pontchartrain Causeway, because of the unloading of that contraflow, it was not going to work. There was not enough capacity down here to get that to work, so what we said was that traffic, if you want it to go west, now I said that people weren't allowed to go west, but you could but just couldn't use the major freeway routes in order to do that, so you have to take U.S. 190, and you would be routed either north or you could take that to Baton Rouge and continue on U.S. 90 to points west. You would be routed north and not be able to access I-12 towards Baton Rouge, you could take 190, which is, more preferably, you were raining guided north towards Jackson, Mississippi. And if you came out of New Orleans and contraflow fashion, you would be routed back in normal lanes, and you could continue west or east and west of the Baton Rouge. Now, what this plan did very successfully is moved people, there's no doubt about what we are looking at an evacuation time to clear the City of New Orleans again, this is people who had access to transportation, and who are going to use the highway base mode of 36 to 38 hours. That was about half of what the Army Corps of Engineers estimate was. I'll be producing the numbers pretty soon, so you'll be able to have a comparison head to head. Now, what I want to say is in some of the more general sense here, what I would like you guys to do who are listening, you need to apply this to your local area, but because of the lessons we are learning here are applicable to anyplace, whether it's for a hurricane, Homeland Security issue, even other types of major events. But an evacuation of New Orleans or any large city is going to have regional consequences. Impact will be felt in the transportation network, perhaps an entire state. There are going to be, there is going to be con congestion, if anybody things you can have an evacuation of an entire city and not have congestion is crazy, so to think that contraflow or any other, doesn't matter how aggressive a traffic management plan you implement, you'll have congestion. The public needs to realize that. Obviously, need to use all of available routes. I talked about the temporal and spatial spreading. Dispersing traffic in all usable routes, and that's the north in addition to west that we saw in Ivan. And encouraging early closure of public offices within that region, so Baton Rouge needs to prepare and needs to get their road network in order so New Orleans can evacuate. The other things are forced movements work better than giving people the ability to route themselves. When I say it works better, it doesn't work better for individuals, and it may crowd some secondary routes, but in New Orleans, we were worried about getting people out of that bowl area, that was the key issue to keep that traffic moving, so that may not be applicable to where you are. And there was other effects from making those decisions. We had a lot of cross state commercial traffic that had to be, instead of coming across Louisiana, might have to go to Jackson, may have to take hundreds and hundreds of miles of detours, but the officials were willing to take that heat to save lives, and that's what needed to be done. And the policy to let people know, if you leave early, you can go where you want, but if you leave late, we are going to use this plan, we are going to tell you where you can go. The full tank of gas and the map assuming people know how to read maps is critically important information as well. I talked about contraflow not solving problems, and the regional effects of that, and lot of routes that look like they are obvious routes to use for contraflow might not work if you don't have adequate outflow capacity or ramp design. Split terminations, what we are seeing there when you get to an end ever a contraflow segment, you want to reemerge that traffic back together. I have viewed a lot of contraflow plans, and there's still a lot of states that do that, and what they are counting on is traffic will have bled off bite the time they by the time they get to that termination point. I would highly suggest using simulation to test to see what the capacities are. Another important thing, need to define and prioritize the goal of your evacuation. Is it to minimize traffic time? Get people out of the threat? You don't have the ability to do both instantaneously central, necessarily, or we will see maximum flows as much less than free flow speeds so that what we are lobbying for is the maximum utilization of those roads, and we have to be flexible in our plans, and anticipate changing as the storms are notorious for changing. And I want to make the point, what we do, this is learning in progress, you know, we are still, every storm, every major evacuation, we learn more, but there are things that cities and states can do to help, like regional origin designation studies so you know where people are coming from and where they are going, and what routes they are likely to take. With that, you can identify areas that there will be congestion, and look at the facility level, look at changes, ramps, find ways even using micro simulation life we've done in Louisiana to utilize the road capacity that we have. Just quick acknowledgments from the involvement of Louisiana Department of Transportation, State Police, up here at L.S.U., two consulting firms, one in New Orleans. And I just put this in here. Obviously, Tom, you had plenty of pictures of this, but this is what we are trying to avoid, and hopefully, we won't see too many more situations like this in the future. Our next presentation is team presentation, John Gamble and Regina McElroy will contribute to our final presentation. John is a senior second California advisor with FEMA Department of Homeland Security, Mitigation Development. This is John Gamble; I would like to start off -- I was impressed by the two previous presentations and level of detail about the evacuations for the City of New Orleans. Let me step back a little bit and kind of try to paint a little bit of a picture of the federal role and federal partnerships we have in evacuations. We've worked for about 20 years with several federal agencies including the corps of engineers, Federal Highway Administration, and the national weather service in NOAA to develop tools and products that will assist state and local governments in developing and their operating their evacuations plans. I think it's been a very effective partnership, and I'm very happy to see how the level of expertise and sophistication is growing, okay? Thank you. Let me give you some background on we are not a large federal program, but our strength really is in our partnerships with the other federal agencies. Our primary role is to help minimize loss of life and minimize damage from hurricanes, and our main role is we do evacuation studies, hurricane evacuation studies in the 21 or 22 hurricane prone states and in the Pacific, and Caribbean territory, and we look at, it's a multileveled study. We look with the other federal partners, we look at what is the has arrested, we work national weather service, hurricane center to look at what is the potential surge and the timing of that surge. What are the different steps, what can we expect for different category storms, and we look at, we take a very conservative look when we look at surge. We want to make sure that we are looking at the life safety goal of looking at surge. So we will develop surge mapping and we tack the maps and work with the state and local governments to come up with evacuation zones, those zones are not necessarily based on the depth that that surge, we will run those evacuations zones into what is a geographic or physical boundary, like a road, so a community can say we're evacuating everything south of a particular highway, or south of a particular physical feature. And we do the behavioral study. We'll look at based on experience and based on working some behavioral experts, how are people going to react to different warnings, how many people are going to evacuate, how many people are going to shelter in place: How many will go to various shelters, where are people going to evacuate to, then we'll take that information, and we will look at the transportation system, we will take, load the various transportation networks, the capacity of the roads to see where the congestion points are, and what is the timing in the evacuation. All this comes up to the fact that we try to develop what we consider clearance times for communities to, for a particular level of evacuation, like a category 1, category 2, 3, what's going to be the timing on evacuating those people through the existing road network out of the area or out of the shelters or to other places of refuge outside the state. Our different partners we have here, the national weather service does the surge, looks at the surge, federal highway administration, we work with them on issues like coordination between different states on for example, this after hurricane Floyd, the people in Georgia that are making decisions on evacuations need to know what is happening in the State of Florida, and when the various traffic loads are going to come into their state. The corps of engineers is our study contractor. They work with the National Weather Service, and with various contractors and transportation expertise, behavioral, to come up with the study products and information that we work with on the state and local governments to give them information to develop their evacuation plans. Give you an idea of what I've been talking about on hurricane evacuation studies. The other tool we have is we have "HURRTRAK" a division assistance tool which state and local communities are access to, that tool actually reaches out through the Internet to actually pull up the forecast information, download it into an assistance tool, which gives ideas on when the evacuation should begin, what, when gale-force winds will hit a particular community, when they should start issuing the mandatory evacuations. It's a very robust tool in terms of the forecast information, the other type of module we have in "HURRTRAK" we have a tide monitoring tool in there, which we can actually look at and see when surge elevation, when it's going to affect a area, and how that will effect the low and high tide, we have a lot of different information in there that is available for state and locals in terms of making decisions. The, I talked about the storm-surge mapping. Let me go down to post-storm assessment. What we typically do after an event, we will go into a community, see how well our products work and serve the needs of state and local decision makers. We will look at, for example, after hurricane Ivan, we went in to look at our surge mapping to see, okay? How has that surge changed with the change in physical features that as a result of Ivan, for example, there was this significant change in the structure system in the coastal barriers, we wanted to see. Okay, for 2005, should we change our evacuation zones extending those further inland because of changing to the physical features along the coast. We'll look at the behavior, did the people, how did these people react, for example, in Ivan, how did they, did they go to shelters, did they go out of state, how many people participated in mandatory evacuations. That information is critical for local decision makers to see, say, "okay, do we need to do a better job of getting the word out? Do we need a better, do we need to have more shelters located in different locations, how did it all work?" Finally, let me go on down to our hurricane liaison team, we found that there was an tremendous need for state and local communities to have access to the forecast information, almost real-time the probable we ran into, we didn't want the state and local government over loading forecasters during the event. The Hurricane Center in Miami has a tremendous job on just keeping up with the forecast and getting that information. So we created a hurricane liaison team which bridges between the state and local emergency manager and the national hurricane center on hurricane forecast information. So we have a number of experts there that can kind of act as a technical resource for state and local governments, what do the forecast information currently tell me, when should I start thing thing about evacuations, do I have questions or things I'm not sure of, we have the experts there, and they are there to help state and local governments. After hurricane Floyd, it was clear that we had some problems. We had a number of problems with communication between the transportation community and emergency management community, and in states like South Carolina, and in Florida. And what came out of this is a couple of things. We realized that we needed to be proactive in getting better communication between the states, and part of that is we developed this evacuation liaison team, and it's a group that has representatives from different states, different federal agencies that is housed in emergency center that can act as the photographing California focal point. That way, the states, state of Georgia and state of Florida can kind of communicate evacuation information so the things that, the state knows what's coming, they know what to expect in terms of traffic, they know when some decisions are made in the state of Florida, and we can make some decisions on evacuation in neighboring states. The evacuation transportation information system was developed, and that's a tool that's not used by every state. It's used by several states to see how existing transportation networks are loaded with evacuees, and where possible points of congestion will be. There's been a couple of spin-offs from that system. The state of South Carolina has a much more robust system that they have developed since hurricane Floyd, and the state of Florida has a more robust system that looks at real-time traffic counters to feed into this type of information system. This is kind of in its infancy, some states have taken it broader, and we are working and coordinating this within states. And finally, let me go on here. Upcoming activities: hurricane Katrina and Rita, tremendous evacuations took place in both. We want to go back and look at hurricane Katrina in terms of what happened, in terms of evacuation. Indications are that it was a fairly successful evacuation for Katrina in New Orleans, that although we do, we realize there were a lot of individuals which we all are aware of that didn't get out of the City of New Orleans and which caused a lot of problems and still do to this day. We are going to go back and also look at Rita, work with the state and local governments on that, there was a tremendous evacuation with Rita, and we found that after these major events like Katrina, the next evacuation that comes up in time line, there's a tremendous participation in evacuation. We are concerned that Rita was perhaps there was not enough people, there was too many people that evacuated, but we don't want to second guess state and local decisions. We will work with them on what decisions were made, how we can make some improvement, so we can work with them on their decision for next year. I've been doing all the talk here, and I'll turn it over to Regina with the Federal Highway Administration I'm delighted to be here, and I want to start off by saying, a very big thank you to all of the speakers today and to Linda Dodge, the moderator who agreed to participate in this on very short notice, and I think that everybody would agree they have done just a great job with the presentations. I want to take a moment to acknowledge Vince Pierce is here, unexpectedy, but I'm very happy to see him, and in fact, I'm going to turn over one of the points that I was going to talk to you about, the safety evacuation report that his office will be working on, and I will turn that over to Vince in just a few moments, and let him tell you about that report, and you'll get that from the horse's mouth. Exactly where the department is and furthering that efforts. Let me start with -- evacuation. The Federal Highway Administration is going to be working on with FEMA and the Army Corps of Engineers. I have to say that I was very happy to hear Brian acknowledge that one of the things that the community needs is a best practice report, or something along those lines to assist the community and not having to reinvent the wheel for each evacuation and certainly giving folks some, an opportunity to learn from other mistakes, and what we've decided to do is not so much a best practice report, but rather a primer on guiding principles, for planning and managing evacuations. We are thinking right now that it will be organized around kind of a generic decision-making process, and we're talking about what tools, what resources are available, what kind of things folks should be thinking about, and we're also talking about the resources that are available. We will bring in input from FEMA, from NOAA folks like that who, as you just heard from John, certainly have a lot to offer to the decision-making processes as to when an evacuation will take place, and then by extension, how long this transportation community has to plan for an evacuation. Another thing that we would like to include in this document is a comprehensive checklist of what needs to be considered when planning for carrying out evacuations and it might be a series of checklists. The audience for this pretty wide ranging are first and for most, because we are the Federal Highway Commission, we wants our division offices to have access to this document because that will help them help our state and local constituents groups, and direct part of the audience would be the state and local groups. We also think that the emergency management community will be very interested in this document, as well as consultants, just a wide spectrum of federal government agencies. I think Dee told me, who helps plan these events, that this is the second most well attended web conference that NTOC has sponsored, and that speaks to the high level of interest there is in this subject, and probably the high levels of interest there will be in a document such as what we were contemplating. As I said, it's a collaborative effort that we are embarking on with FEMA and the corps, and we hope to have it ready for distribution by the beginning of May. I wanted to say a word about the ITS/JPO initiative on emergency transportation operations. I suspect that a number of you have heard about this of it. That falls under the auspices of the joint program office, and when it was originally kicked off, it was conceived as kind of a collection of projects, if you will, very good projects, but nonetheless, it was not really an initiative, and the body of individuals that are in charge of how the money is pend will be deployed indicated they wanted to see the joint program office funds sent on a few initiatives. That would be a really high pay-off, high-risk activity that has the potential for tremendous bang for the dollar, if you will. So we are going back to revisit this initiative. There's no doubt in my mind that there will be an initiative on evacuations. I think that everybody is very clear that this is something the community needs a way that the Department of Transportation can make a strong, good contribution to this area. So we're going to go back and we're going to look at an initiative that will probably focus on the application of I.T.F Technologies and that would be evacuations that are not only occasioned by hurricanes, but occasioned by any events at all. It could be a terrorist event, it could be a technology event, such as a black-out, it, an all hazard sort of approach to this. We are right now in the midst of working on a gas assessment, and that should be completed in the next few months. And at that point, we will scope oust this initiative, and shortly thereafter, make a presentation to the management council to make sure they are happy with our direction, and surely, you all will be hearing about that in the future. I'm going to turn the podium over to Vince Pierce, and he is going to talk about the safety report, and Vince used to be the team leader for the Emergency Transportation Operations team here in the Office of Operations. He recently literally moved up in the world to the Office of the Secretary of Transportation where he works in the Office of Emergency Preparedness, and one of his responsibilities, I believe, will be seeing, helping his boss see this report through to complete. Let me turn it over to Vince. Thanks very much. And I'm going to tell you about this report but in context of two others. Because there are two other projects to which is it's closely related. This particular project, this looks at, or in the original language of the bill, looks only at evacuations and only in the coastal states. During the conference deliberations, it broadened pretty significantly, and is now focussed on hurricane catastrophic events, but is brought denied to any. It's been extended to look at known only the gulf states but their adjoining states and it looks both at the state level and at the county level. So we are looking at something on the order of probably close to a thousand total evacuations plans that will be taking a peak at. The Congress came forward with a number of factors they wanted us to look at, some of them are pretty solid kinds of things. Does the plan recognize where fuel is available along the route, does it recognize where shelters spaces available, does it recognize how that information is communicated to the evacuees? But it also has a bee behavioral piece and it says does the plan recognize what the social and mental stresses are that are brought about by an evacuation causing event, and process of evacuating itself, so I think the output of the study will have a variety of findings that are really useful in a number of areas. The process we're going to use is that we're going to work with the states, counties and parishes to actually compare or analyze their evacuation plans through a series of peer review, if you will, a large checklist, set of criteria that are being developed based on prior experiences and certainly, the, this hurricane season has been a major learning event for all of us in the field of evacuation. And out of that will come some findings as to how well plans do, and don't match those criteria, some issues, some needs and probably some recommendations. Now, I mentioned this relates to two other projects, one of them very closely because about the same time that our requirement can go to Congress, Congress and the White House passed the department of Homeland Security in cooperation with DOT and some other agencies to look at the evacuation plans of all 50 states, and the 75 largest metropolitan areas. Again, evacuation plans in the context of all hazards all modes of transportation. It turns out that DHS's project is running a pretty similar timeline to ours, I will. Which is natural both of them need to be done before the beginning of the hurricane season, so they need to be done before the 1st of June. So, and we are working closely with them to coordinate the kinds of facts that we are looking at, and there for, the utility of our checklist and their findings and so forth, the third study that comes in is a more transit focus study. Again, this was directed to the federal transit administration to be performed by the National Academy of Science, the transportation research board, and it's going to be looking more closely at the public transit aspects of evacuation, because, our post event evacuation experience with Katrina was heavily public transit dependent. But I think having raised everybody's awareness of the need for comprehensive capability to evacuate both persons with personal transportation and persons without. We're taking a closer look at how public transit is applied in evacuation, how that application can be approved, improved and so we are that project is on a different time scale. It has a two year deadline, so my guess is that the findings from our study, the findings from DHS's study will feed into that as possible additional issues that they will be looking at. So as you can see, we've got a very intensive program of research on evacuations across the hazard, across the modes, across a broad variety of factors, and I think way we will see coming out of this is, should be very useful to practitioners across the nation, whether at the federal, state or local level. Thank you. Thank you. thanks again to everybody. Certainly was informative, and my calculations with regard to questions and requests for information, certainly most have been thought provoking on your end as well. We have over 70 inquiries and questions, so what I tried to do is just pick a few that I can categorize into some semblance of management for me, which is, I picked a couple traveler information, congestion, mobility and planning, and public safety. So what we'll do, apparently all the questions as far as I found were basically geared to all participants. So whoever feels comfortable responding to the questions with regard to the faculty, please do so. the first question with regard to travel information was beyond public media channels, what was the extent of information made available to the public? And along those lines, there was a question regarding cell phone access availability, and was their customized cellphone services made available for evacuees. Well, can you hear me? Yes. From the standpoint of Louisiana, I know one of the things that I talked to Regina about this before, was the contraflow maps were actually distributed at grocery stores and that was, there's a big public information campaign that was undertaken in the State of Louisiana for people who were going to be using the routes, where it would take them, there was a website they used, and I've heard discussions in other states as far as getting hurricane evacuation information out bay utility bills, and even getting maps and information putting him into yellow pages, because the gulf states are also big tourist areas where people are not necessarily familiar with some of the local routes, and the fought was if you put it in the yellow pages, they could rip it out and take it with them On the map, did it also show where and when to get into the contraflow lanes? Not when, but it showed where. The when, or the temporal aspect, that was purely a function of when it was started and when it was ended, and there's a bunch of theories and ideas of when contraflow should start, and when it should end. Which I don't know if you want me to get into those details. Vince knows about it. Okay. Then lets move on to the next question. Brian and Tom... Let me say, because our contraflow lanes were not part of the original plan, they were adapted as we got into the circumstances that we experienced, clearly, the message was put out through the media for the biggest push on public information through the unified joints information center. We didn't use the dynamic message signs as much, we had the opportunities at the media outlets for their, at TranStar, they were with us, we used the private traffic providers, they helped d.that out, but colleagues at TxDOT and TranStar could get more specific on how the messaging was used, we do have the capability of communicating through the customized PDAs, and they can get more specific. But at one point, the network was over lode, so back up, we did have the ability to communicate during PDAs as another way of communicating. I think our biggest dominance was through the media to get it to the travelers Along those lines and I think Tom you addressed this, but Brian, if you can, what DMS sign imagine messages were provided? Were they consistent? And how were they provided? Each answer to that is very few, there's not a very, not a lot of message signs in Louisiana or New Orleans. The only real variable message sign was a sign that said basically if you want to go to Baton Rouge, get in the right two lanes, if you want to go north on I-55, stall in the left lane. Those messages can cause a little bit of difficulty, because you tends to get weaving, and people trying to make decisions while they are on their way, so what was encouraged in Louisiana, have your plan, know where you want to end up, and know that before you get on the freeway. We tried to move the decision points from the freeways on to the arterial street network. Anybody else? Thank you. One that I found particularly interesting, I can appreciate, I'm going to skip to what I consider a priority needs list, it seems that an individual who addressed the question board indicated that evidently, a shall we say an informal survey was done of employees. And the priority needs during the evacuation seemed to be restaurants and fuel, in that order, and lots of congestion created by evacuees getting on and off the highway for those two particular priorities, and how was that managed? And if it wasn't managed well, how would you recommend managing it in the future? I'll respond. We didn't do a good job of pre-planning. In the Houston Harris County region, we had a good system in place that through the technology of TranStar, we could see waves going on, but when we had five lanes of freeway going down to two lanes of freeway through the outlying counties, that's where we began to get the merge choke points. We did not do a good job of working with our colleagues in other counties, making sure they knew of what we would be sending to them, and the impacts of that, so the comment I made earlier, don't wait until the day of the emergency to exchange a business card is a lesson we learned very clearly, there has to be an approach, we talk about emergency management. Think globally and act locally , act locally term has to be act regionally, because the county has to look at outlying counties and how to work with them in the events we have to move traffic to their area and then what are the resources whether it's hard resources, people resources, technology resources to help us move people through an area, because you are not always going to have the people power to close ramps and so we have to do a different way. Lots of lessons for us is looking at the region and how we best conserve the emergency management, emergency response, emergency evacuation needs and regional approach, not just in our primary county. That leads us into the part of the next question, and I hope everybody can contribute to this, what real-time re planning adjustments were made after evacuations were taking place, and what lessons were learned and how it will affect mans in the future? I think we have to do a better job of scenario planning. We need to sit back and say what if, what if this, and that, and look at worst case scenarios, we have to get the reality that if we are going to continue to use contra flows, if we are going to continue to use how we are tieing arterial networks into the freeway corridors, watch the consequences of making decisions if we shift folks around, and we need to learn that, to integrate, to instrument, tie those corridors in that helps us have better information knowledge. Anybody else have something to add? One thing I would like to add, and I'm sure that the state and local officials that were involved in Rita and Katrina have thought about, after Floyd, the evacuations that took place right after hurricane Floyd, participation rate was tremendous, but over a period of time, subsequent evacuations, participate rates tend to go down, and hurricane Rita hit at perhaps one of the points in time where you are just going to get a tremendous participation in evacuation, even in there's areas you didn't want to evacuate, you don't want to consider shell in place. So one thing I think, for the research community and practitioners, I think we need to look at the timing of evacuations how close they are to the major catastrophic evacuations, what are some reasonable things to expect in terms of evacuation numbers, and how is that going to change over time. For example, next year, if you had an evacuation in the Houston area, how is that going to, what will be different next year from this year in terms of -- I mean from the Katrina experience, so things to consider by the practitioners and research community. I want to echo what he said, reality is the effects of Katrina did add a fear factor, I believe, that really folks wanted to get out of Houston area, when we heard category 5, winds at 175 miles an hour, and water surge impacts. One of of the fascinating things we got through some, and I believe survey from the local media outlets, about 72% of the folks who responded got caught up in the congestion said, if a similar circumstance hit again, they would evacuation again. So there is some learning we need to do from that, but that was quite fascinating percentages. I would like to add one thing, or follow up to your issue about what changes were made during the event or on the fly. I can't speak to that too much in detail in Louisiana, but there's one thing that comes up and it's come up several times and that's the coordination of signals on, signals on non-interstate route, and what we've seen is during the event, you'll have a community that is, maybe a rural community, along a route that will turn their signals to flash, and then you get two miles down the road, and they are operating in businesses as usual form, and there's sometimes there's jurisdictions and sometimes there's not that allow to you force them to change the signals, because everybody is till trying to serve the local traffic, and to follow up on the idea of ITS and coordination and all those things, I think what a lot of people have to understand is we are a long way from fully-instrumented highways and all this high-tech gadgets and wizardry, we have to understand that evacuations are primarily rural events, they are not urban events. Once you get out into the little areas where you are 100 or 200 miles away from a big city, there's not a lot of real-time monitoring and chunk communications and coordinates nation going on. So I think we're a long way off from that. We wants to bring that stuff to the, put ton the plate as much as we can, but I think we are a little bit ahead of ourselves. I like taking exception just to some degree, Brian. Please. I think the issue, I understand, but it's not cost wizardry, it's stuff that works today, that helps us make decisions in whatever we are responding to. You can use the same technology to leverage off that, to benefit, where I think we need to do it is arterial roadways, and we have the interstates highway in the urban area, and we need to use those and instruments then, so there is a connectivity between communications, and I think one lesson we learned, evacuation shelters typically are outside the urban core, and they go into rural areas but we couldn't see the routes getting to those rural areas, so where there's an opportunities to take leveraging whether it's through wireless technology to see cameras, as long as you can, because at some point, you may lose them as well, so we need to look at redundant back up systems, but I guess technology is cost wizard dry, the real world applications that can benefit us in making decisions whether it's a public safety community or the transportation community. Tom has made a couple interesting points, and, I suggest we keep in mind, and one is this issue of shelter, we have to remember people are evacuating to somewhere, and first of all, when you have a situation like we had in Rita where you had just gobs more people evacuate than we normally expect, that means you are going to be. We were talking about things in real-time, you are going to be opening up more shelters in real-time, if you will, and that shelter information is one of the key pieces of information you need to get to the evacuees, so we can, we in transportation, be a part of that solution to let them know that, where those shelters are available. Side note is that if you had asked us three years ago about shelters, we would have said shelters are simple, clean kind of issue, people, we don't deal with pets, I'm sorry, the map has changed, and we now definitely have to worry because a lot of people are bringing their companion animals with them, and I would say that issue is literally receiving national visibility, and is under consideration as a components of some legislation. So we are going to have more shelters, different kinds of shelters, certainly the special needs shelters requirements will continue to be an issue as well. The other thing, those of us who worked hurricane Wilma spent several days in a, I guess a major state of consternation because people didn't evacuate for Wilma. Wilma was a huge big storm, it was 400 miles across when it reached the west coast of Florida. And although the storm force had not dropped some, we knew that there was going to be a big area covered by the tropical storm force winds, and so for days, we monitored the flow of traffic out of south Florida. We know the state of Florida had polished up its contraflow plan, and that plan was never trigger because traffic volumes never reached even a fraction of what we saw evacuate for Katrina or receipt is Rita, so what this season has given us in terms of figuring out home people will evacuate is dots all over the chart, and no good line in between. Any other comments? Next question I'd like to throw out again to all participants, one writer has requested information with regard to managing the number of vehicles used in evacuations. Evidently during the Houston/Galveston evacuation, the traffic demand was larger than the necessary because several, families were evacuating with multiple vehicles, and the question is what success can we expect to convince them to limit the number of vehicles. Who wants to try that one? The answer is that is true, what we found is folks were taking multiple vehicles with them, because they were concerned about the protection of their property. I can't remember the statistics, but clearly, there were folks taking vehicles with them. I don't know the answer to the question, but that's what we will have to look at as to how you get, somebody talked earlier about how do you do evacuation in phases. We have a phase plan in Texas, a phase plan in this area, but I think that as Mr. Gamble mentioned, we had the fear factor, lots of people were ready to go before the mandatory evacuation in the Houston area, so I don't know a good answer to the question. That's something we are going to have to consider though. and I'm in the same boat, we've known for a long time that people will take multiple vehicles, take their motor home, and you get people taking boats, loading up cars with possessions and taking that, dune buggies, whatever will drive, and we also have a similar experience here in Louisiana that we've seen in numerous situations that, trying to do phase evacuation is really difficult. I mean I've heard discussions, we can say use a jurisdictional boundary, city boundary or parish line or we could use a route, but if I'm looking across the street, and I see those people evacuate, and they are telling me not to evacuate, I will evacuate, too, so that's a whole another can of worms behavioral or psychology that is being studied. And we need to keep in mind that the vehicles that Brian just mentioned, which is a representative sample, they don't behavior the same as your passenger cars. Different handling characteristics, stopping, separation, and so forth, and so the figures that may have been in your evacuation model based on mom, pop and the kid and the dog being in the family car may not be as accurate as they used to be. Any other comments to that question? Another one, one that I think has already just recently been addressed, and that was again the phase evacuation, an example of Conroe is 100 miles from the coast, and 100 feet above sea level, and yet those individuals in that community were evacuated, contributing to additional congestion, and I believe you said that's something that can't be addressed at this point? I think, again, I think a lot of it has to boil down to human behavior and human nature, and the circumstances that we as individuals are dealing with, in this circumstance, we had just seen in this region, devastation that New Orleans had experienced, and I think there is a level of fear that went into that. And at some point in time, people are going to make decisions that they think are best for them individually and best for their families, and they are going to act on those decisions. And I think that's what we saw here. and to follow up on that, Vince, maybe that's what we saw in Houston with the backlash from heat that, where you had people who said look, I'm not going to sit in barometric bumper traffic. Lots of people died in the evacuation of Rita more than the storm, my wife's grandparents lived in Naples. We are in more traffic on the freeway. But on the coming back, there was phase return plan. And I think the public did an outstanding job in following the Governor's Office of the Emergency Management's recommendation of how we would phase back this community. There was strong local elected leadership working with the business community and the government entities to delay opening the schools, delay asking folks to come back to work unless them essential to make sure we had necessary, to keep the community active and going, and folks listened to that so the counter was it work very welcoming back. If we can learn lessons from that and apply it, there can be a good implementation. But it boils down to human nature. I have two public safety questions. One of which is a personal question, not on the message board, had a to do with phone calls I've been getting from highway safety individuals, and at first it sounds like cut and dried like a no brainer, but basically the question is during this type of disaster and evacuation, in your experience does law enforcement look the other way in enforcing basic safety laws like number of occupants in a vehicle based on seat belts, child safety seats, and that type of information? Basically there are some lawmakers that are concerned they can't give their agencies the ability to ignore those, but what happens if they don't enforce them? What are the results? I'll let Brian answer that. Officers have discretion in handling any circumstance they need to handle. And when you get into an emergency management role where you are trying to serve the community and the fundamental mission is making sure you are protecting people first, that's what you are going to do in my view, so whether, I guess from the standpoint of are you focusing on traffic violations, you are focusing on those things that would make sure that you can mitigate injuries to individuals, injuries to the public, and also the role of making sure that those things don't impact mobility when you are trying to move people, so unless you are -- am I going to have a radar task force operating when we are trying to evacuate people out of the community during an emergency? No. Am I going to thack those resources and apply them to help work with the other stakeholders that have to participate in getting people out of community safely? Yes. Okay. I think the basic concern was allowing numerous children to be put in vehicles without child safety seats That's a fundamental safety issue. If you have somebody that is in there and it's not safe, I think you are going to take that on. And this will be the final question. With regard to public safety resources, were there any advanced staging of resources and during the contraflow, how were you able to get in an inspiring record to support the evacuees? I will restate something I said earlier, because I think it's important, we need to do a better job from the lessons learned of out reaching with not only the public safety, community, but all emergency service respondents and transportation officials to make sure we have an integrated coordinated plan based upon worst case scenarios. Then having said that, we did not anticipate what we saw going out. Our emergency planning in the area was pretty on how we would get people off Galveston side predicated. At TxDOT, they would say I-45 south, we didn't have any traffic problems. Our problems came to the north and problems came to the west, and problems came to the northeast of Hewings, not to the south of Houston. So that's something we had to learn. We used HOV lanes and opened them up to move people. Lesson learned is keeping HOV lanes accessible to emergency vehicles so we don't get them jammed up. There are lessons learned on how to do the pre-staging of fuel, of whatever equipments would be necessary in closing ramps. And I don't think it has to be public safety officers only, we have a great towing community that has to be involved in emergency planning for regions, and how do you use them? How do you we use school buses, public works vehicles, how do we do hard closures if that's appropriate? So I think we have to sit back as we are doing today and making recommendations of where we think we can make improvements from a safety stand point, and prepare the community in the future the future. Is there any other comments from any of the speakers? Yes, I'd like to make one comment. I think it's important that we take an opportunity with Rita and with Katrina and what's happened this year to look at best how our different roles -- how accountable is the federal government? Did it best serve you as an emergency management community; how we all should act together in one of these situations, and that will come out in some of the post studies that are going to take place. The reason I say it, it's important that when we go out from here into the future, that we clearly know what each of us, our roles are and how we improve things down the road, and your experience will be invaluable to put definition on that. Anything else? Thank you all for joining us, and thank you for your participation on what I believe was a successful web broadcast. We thank you for your participation, this will conclude today's seminar. (end)