Corpus Christi Caller Times Caller.com - State: Evacuation bottleneck OK

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Monday, August 30, 1999

State: Evacuation bottleneck OK
Opening 4 I-37 lanes called complicated; would jam San Antonio
By Jennifer Stump
Caller-Times

If you look to the left as you leave Corpus Christi and head over the Nueces River Bridge on Interstate 37, you can see it.
   It's an unused, barricaded, never-tested ramp.
   Two years ago, the Texas Department of Transportation built it to get drivers going north onto the southbound side of I-37 in case of a mass evacuation of the Coastal Bend. The plan would point all four lanes of traffic heading toward San Antonio. But even with Hurricane Bret - a Category 4 storm - bearing down on the city Aug. 22, the expanded escape route never materialized.
   The decision angered some residents who were stuck in an 8-hour traffic jam to reach San Antonio. And it mystified some local public officials who wanted to get as many people out of town as possible before Bret struck.
   "I kind of reacted," said County Judge Richard Borchard, who had expected that four lanes of traffic would be heading out of town. "It was a great plan. When I saw the traffic wasn't moving, I thought, 'Surely, all the lanes to San Antonio would be open.' DPS told me they were not. I was very disappointed to say the least, but I have to rely on their judgement for public safety."
   Borchard said a policy to open the additional lanes to San Antonio would encourage more residents to evacuate.
   "I think more people would have been out of here faster," he said. "I think people in the future would know that they had been moving on the interstate, that they weren't having to drive 5-10 miles per hour, and that would make them more willing to evacuate again."
   City Manager David Garcia said local emergency planning officials asked the state to consider opening all lanes of I-37 as an evacuation route going north.
   "I think it's a perfectly reasonable thing to do," Garcia said. "We asked them, and they said there's too many exits, too many barricades to put up. They said it's too complicated."
   Fact or fiction?
   Although rumors of the supposed interstate escape route floated through the community last Sunday, Garcia said he doesn't have a copy of the DPS plan to turn southbound traffic to the north.
   "I think it's one of those urban myths," Garcia said. "I've never seen it."
   If the plan doesn't exist, it should, Garcia and Borchard said.
   Jo Moss, public information officer with the Governor's Office of Emergency Management, said there is a proposal, but no formal plan, to turn all of I-37 toward San Antonio.
   "At this point, there's a lot of safety obstacles that have to be overcome," Moss said. "When a storm like Bret is bearing down on you, it's not the time to see if something works. We're talking about a very long stretch of interstate here. This has never been done before here."
   Bottleneck problems
   Moss said having four lanes headed north would only create a traffic jam once people reached San Antonio. It also would prevent emergency vehicles from reaching Corpus Christi, she said, because even the shoulder of the roadway would be filled with people switching drivers and cars having engine trouble.
   "At some point, you have to get them back into their own lanes. You just create a bottleneck further north," she said. "Whatever you do, you have to undo. Is it worth the risk?"
   The Texas Department of Transportation estimated that 30,000 vehicles evacuated from Corpus Christi, while city officials estimated that more than 90 percent of the island residents left town.
   Many officials say the city can use this as a drill for the next time a hurricane strikes the Coastal Bend.
   "If people do exactly what they did this time, we'll have exactly the same results, but with more property damage," Garcia said. "The important thing is that we protect lives. If we can do the same thing for every hurricane that comes through here, we'll be in good shape."
   Total coordination
   Becky Kureska, spokeswoman with TxDOT, said even though DPS and the Governor's Office of Emergency Management make the call on closing the interstate to incoming traffic, she has received calls from angry area residents who sat in the evacuation traffic jam last Sunday.
   "One lady called me screaming," Kureska said. "We've taken so much heat. People need to understand that it was inconvenient, but they did get out. I know traffic moved slowly, but it moved."
   Turning interstate traffic in a different direction would require the coordination of hundreds of DPS troopers, local police and sheriff's deputies - most of whom already would be directing traffic and working to evacuate the city, she said.
   DPS would block off the interstate in San Antonio, then drive down to Corpus Christi and barricade every entrance ramp, making sure that all traffic was off the road. An officer would be posted at every entrance ramp to prevent cars from driving south and causing head-on collisions.
   "It is a huge task," Kureska said. "It is not as easy as it sounds. We have to block every intersection and get people off the road in San Antonio. To deploy this takes hours. It's not as simple as putting up the barriers and letting people drive."
   Closed-off rest stops
   Police also closed off some of the rest stop areas along I-37 because people were using them as a way to cut ahead in the traffic. The move left thousands of evacuees with no rest stops - except for the side of the road.
   Unlike the evacuation during Hurricane Allen in 1980, evacuees tended to be courteous drivers, Kureska said.
   "People were actually very nice on the road," Kureska said. "They acted like grown-ups."
   The Governor's Office of Emergency Management has estimated that if Bret had hit Corpus Christi directly, 80,000 structures would have been destroyed or heavily damaged.
   Local officials asked residents to stop evacuating at 2 p.m. - 30 minutes before hurricane force winds were projected to reach the city.
   "It was a cause of concern," said Chris Lawrence, Nueces County risk manager. "You don't want to be on the highway even with tropical storm force winds. We should have had four lanes on 37 northbound."
   Worst-case scenario
   Lawrence said it takes 29 hours to evacuate Nueces County, but Hurricane Bret picked up so much speed on its way to making landfall that officials only had 10 hours to get people out of town.
   "It was the worst-case scenario," he said. "I think that given the horrible circumstances we had, the decisions were made well."
   Voluntary evacuation requests were issued for the island and low-lying areas such as North Beach and Flour Bluff at 9:30 p.m. Saturday, then upgraded to a mandatory evacuation at 8 a.m. Sunday. That was the same time Corpus Christi residents were asked to voluntarily evacuate.
   If anything, the voluntary evacuation request for Corpus Christi should have come earlier, Garcia said.
   Mayor Loyd Neal said officials estimated it was taking 6-8 hours to reach San Antonio when they called off the evacuation. "We didn't want people on the road in the dark with the eye passing over," he said.
   Worse than staying home
   Bob Chartuk, spokesman with the National Hurricane Center in Miami, said having people stuck on I-37 when a hurricane makes landfall would be worse than having them stay at home and shelter-in-place.
   "If a hurricane would hit a few thousand people in a traffic jam, it could be much more devastating," Chartuk said. "Just because you had Bret doesn't mean you're off the hook."
   Robert R. Butterworth, a clinical psychologist and director of International Trauma Associates, Inc. in Los Angeles, said planning evacuation routes is an important step that Corpus Christi and other area towns should work on improving.
   "They could work on evacuating certain sections of town down one highway and other areas down different routes,'' he said. "There are computer-simulated models now that people can work with to design evacuation to avoid bottlenecks. People shouldn't be having to deal with that.''
   More people fleeing
   Butterworth said the most obvious reason for more evacuees is increasing development along America's coastlines.
   "Sixty percent of people in the United States live an hour from the ocean,'' he said. "So more people are going to be on the roads fleeing storms. Officials have to figure out a way to deal with that.''
   Bret was upgraded from a Category 1 to a Category 4 hurricane in the span of one day, then made landfall less than 24 hours later.
   Lawrence said Bret increased in strength too quickly for people to adjust to the idea of evacuating for a major storm.
   "We're creatures that hate change. I think the biggest problem we had with evacuation was getting enough people to leave early enough," Lawrence said. "I do fault a level of complacency that exists in our community. It was at the point that people had to decide to run or board up."
   Past hurricanes' examples
   With Hurricane Allen in 1980, residents watched the storm grow for days and eventually fill up the Gulf of Mexico.
   During Allen, residents of the Lower Rio Grande Valley started evacuating a day or two earlier than Corpus Christi, Mayor Loyd Neal said. When Coastal Bend residents followed suit, it created a massive traffic pile-up, with hundreds of thousands of South Texas residents trying to reach San Antonio at the same time. People were overheating on the side of the road and getting into fistfights because tempers were flaring so badly, he said.
   "There was a massive evacuation of Corpus Christi," Neal said. "That was our first experience with it and we had thousands of people sitting on the road."
   During Hurricane Celia, the last major hurricane to hit the Corpus Christi area directly, Neal said no one had time to evacuate.
   "It was 'put a little tape on your windows and pray,' " Neal said. "The emergency planning wasn't anything like it is today. We didn't have time to leave. On a Sunday night, they said it was going to Victoria. When I woke up Monday morning, they said the eye would pass over Corpus Christi. At 3:30, it did."
   But he said emergency planning officials are pleased with the evacuation, given the short amount of time they had to get people out of town.
   "People were orderly. They were respectful," Neal said. "We communicated well. Would I have done something different? If I'd had three more days, I would have. But we didn't."



Staff writer Mary Lee Grant contributed to this report. Staff writer Jennifer Stump can be reached at 886-3778 or by e-mail at stumpj@caller.com

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