Lessons From Katrina and Rita: What Major Disasters Can Teach Transportation Planners

Two devastating hurricanes, Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita, hit the United States in 2005. This article examines lessons transportation planners can learn from these disasters to improve their own emergency response preparations and to avoid repeating problems in the future. In the case of Hurricane Katrina, automobile evacuation appeared to function adequately. However, there was no effective plan to evacuate transit-dependent residents despite estimates of there being over 200,000 people in the New Orleans area that did not have access to reliable personal transportation. From a transportation planning perspective, the greatest mistake in the case of Katrina was the failure to deploy buses to evacuate these residents without charge. In the case of Hurricane Rita, which hit the Louisiana and Texas coasts a month after Katrina, free bus transportation was provided for nondrivers and more residents responded to evacuation instructions. This resulted in severe highway traffic congestion. County officials later admitted that their plans had not anticipated the high volume of traffic. Mistakes in this case included failure to implement counterflow lanes as announced, failure to manage fuel distribution, failure to provide basic services along the evacuation route, and failure to give buses priority in traffic. Planners can help prevent future disasters by demanding that emergency response plans devote as much attention to non-automobile evacuation as to automobile evacuation, and by developing ways to prioritize use of critical transportation resources during emergencies. Planners need to anticipate the needs of nondrivers, understand and address why many people ignore evacuation orders, and make an extra effort to offer comfort (such as washrooms and information stations) along evacuation routes.