Overview
Transportation plays a vital role in evacuation mitigation, planning, response, and recovery. However, “the majority of the emergency operations plans for large urbanized areas are only partially sufficient in describing in specific and measurable terms how a major evacuation could be conducted successfully, and few focus on the role of transit…Even among localities with evacuation plans, few have provided for a major disaster that could involve multiple jurisdictions or multiple states in a region and necessitate the evacuation of a large fraction of the population” (Transportation Research Board [TRB] 2008). A major event requiring multijurisdictional, multimodal coordination involving several layers of government (local, regional, state(s), and perhaps federal) as well as private and nonprofit entities may seem unlikely in many jurisdictions. However, the United States experienced more billion-dollar natural disasters in 2011 than in any other year on record according to the National Climatic Data Center.