Learning from traffic data collected before, during and after a hurricane

Abstract

Hurricanes harm people and damage property through extreme wind speeds and flooding associated with heavy rains and storm surge. One of the most effective and widely used tactics to protect people from hurricanes is evacuation. Improved knowledge of the behavior of communities before, during and after an evacuation can better support emergency planning and operations, and thus help make evacuations safer and more efficient. The objective of this work is to identify ways to use traffic data to better understand evacuation behavior and to explore ways to integrate traffic data into evacuation planning and response. Traffic data collected in Delaware before, during and after Hurricane Irene in August 2011 using automated traffic recorders are assembled and analyzed. The analysis shows that a significant number of residents and visitors evacuated from the beach communities and the evacuation patterns are very similar to the traffic patterns experienced on summer weekends. These insights suggest that this type of analysis may also be of value for other events in other communities.