Research collaboration helps Gulf Coast communities plan for the unpredictable
Projects across the state use storm-surge, population and transportation data to develop real-time strategies for hurricane evacuations.
Texas A&M researchers are collaborating with local, state and federal emergency partners to map storm-surge risks, identify vulnerable communities and plan evacuation routes for Gulf Coast hurricanes.
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For communities along the Gulf Coast, hurricane season presents a recurring challenge: knowing when, where and how to evacuate before a major storm hits. To tackle this, researchers at Texas A&M University have spent more than a decade helping local, state and federal agencies develop clear, data-driven evacuation strategies.
Walter Peacock, professor and principal investigator, said the research team collaborates with municipalities, county officials and federal partners that include NOAA, FEMA and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. These organizations evaluate storm surge risks and establish evacuation zones tailored to shifting coastal populations.
“We work with local counties and municipalities to re-evaluate their surge risk,” Peacock said. “We look at where inundations are likely to be given different types of storms, different trajectories, forward speeds and wind speeds. This data helps them develop their evacuation zones.”
Solving problems before they happen
The team’s efforts span coastal regions across Texas, including the Rio Grande Valley, the Coastal Bend and Southeast Texas. Through these projects, researchers examine population vulnerabilities, mapped structures and transportation logistics. The resulting data feeds directly into HURREVAC (HURRicane EVACuation), the primary software decision-makers use during active storm threats to calculate evacuation times and set emergency plans into motion.
“We take a storm that’s coming in, its forward speed, its trajectory and run a quick analysis of where it’s likely to impact,” Peacock said. “On the basis of that, they use what we’ve done for them to say, ‘OK, we probably need to evacuate zones A, B and C.’”
A major factor in evacuation planning involves human behavior and how residents respond to emergency notifications. David Bierling of the Texas A&M Transportation Institute (TTI) and the Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center’s director of transportation research leads the team’s behavioral studies and convened an analysis summit as part of the final Southeast Texas Study Area. It was attended by top evacuation researchers that have studied multiple evacuation events in Texas.
“Spatial analysis and GIS mapping allow us to pinpoint the most at-risk neighborhoods and visualize how evacuation routes interact with vulnerable populations,” said Douglas Wunneburger, co-principal investigator from the Department of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning. “Spatial analysis steps begin with surge models based on historic and predicted storm scenarios to determine risk defined by potential maximum extent of surge inundation. The team selects well-known geographic features, usually highways, to set draft zone boundaries encompassing maximum surge extent for review by local experts and stakeholders. Once boundaries are set, estimates for population and household vulnerability factors, for number of vehicles and for temporary lodging populations are derived to feed transportation models.”
Teaming up to plan routes for evacuation
Transportation modeling plays a central role in answering these behavioral questions and mapping out realistic evacuation timelines.
Darrell Borchardt, co-PI from the TTI, said the purpose of the modeling was to provide a reasonable estimate of evacuation clearance times from the region. The Real-time Evacuation Planning Model (RTEPM) was used to evaluate each of the 88 scenarios; the set of scenarios was jointly developed by the project team in conjunction with representatives of the public agencies throughout the region. The resulting matrix of evacuation time estimates is included in HURREVAC, which is used by local officials to better plan for evacuations from their respective regions in the event of a projected landfall of a tropical system.
He said the most powerful part of the project was a combination of working with the project team as well as being in the same room with emergency managers throughout the region observing how they worked together in developing the scenarios as a group.
“Everyone involved had the same goal of facilitating evacuation throughout the region in the best interest of citizens that may be impacted by an approaching storm,” Borchardt said.
Ultimately, the initiative relies on interdisciplinary collaboration across Texas A&M departments and research institutes to deliver practical tools directly to emergency managers.
“We’re a big team effort, so we want that to continue,” Peacock said.
