By Melinda Deslatte, The Associated Press
BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) -- Hurricane evacuations will be more closely coordinated between state and local officials to stagger the times, offer alternate driving routes and attempt to avoid another traffic tie-up like the vehicle crawl spurred by Hurricane Ivan, state officials said Friday.
“What we know now is that (traffic) has to be a central part of the plan,” said Andy Kopplin, Gov. Kathleen Blanco’s chief of staff, after a so-called “after-action review” of Louisiana’s response to the threat of Ivan.
Residents from the New Orleans area, the southeastern coastal parishes and other neighboring Gulf Coast states, all fleeing the unknown path of Ivan, took as long as 10 hours to drive the 70 miles from New Orleans to Baton Rouge on the interstate highways, creating frustration and calls for improvements to the state’s evacuation procedures during a storm.
“The time that people spent on the highway was unacceptable, and we want to do better,” said Maj. Gen. Bennett Landreneau, commander of the Louisiana National Guard.
Kopplin said while the state has had among the most sophisticated hurricane tracking systems, it hasn’t had as much sophistication in its traffic plans.
For the next big storm that seems headed to Louisiana, officials said state and local emergency experts will coordinate not only safety, security and public health needs, but also plans to avoid traffic snares.
Kopplin said the state emergency preparedness office will coordinate with local mayors and parish presidents on the timeline for evacuation announcements, staggering those evacuations as to avoid an immediate spill onto the highways all at once.
And when those evacuation announcements are made, local officials will suggest alternate routes to the interstates and have details of where residents can get maps showing those evacuation routes, according to Kopplin.
Col. Henry Whitehorn, the head of state police, said helicopters will monitor the traffic situation by air, and Kopplin said a contingent of transportation department, state police and other officials will work solely on traffic problems during the preparations and evacuations for a storm.
Revisions -- including possible extensions -- also may be made to the state police’s “contra-flow” plan, in which inbound lanes on interstates are reversed from Kenner to LaPlace, but those changes would take much longer to start, well after the end of hurricane season in November.
Kopplin said there will be one immediate change to the contra-flow plan: When evacuations are ordered in Jefferson and Orleans parishes, that will immediately trigger the start of the lane reversals. It took hours between the time New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin told residents to flee Ivan and the lane reversals began.
State transportation officials have hired a consultant to review the use of contra-flow and look at a possible extension of the lane reversals all the way to Baton Rouge, but that would involve the construction of crossovers on Interstate 10, which could take up to two years.
The transportation department is doing models of possible changes to the contra-flow plan and will get input from local New Orleans area officials at a hurricane summit next month.
As for Ivan, the once-mighty hurricane returned again to the Gulf Coast, this time sloshing ashore Thursday near the southern Texas-Louisiana border as a tropical storm with no hint of the devastation it caused as a Category 4 hurricane last week.
Ivan and its remnants were blamed for at least 52 deaths in the United States and 70 in the Caribbean. Much of the destruction was caused by flooding.