Louisiana Highway Evacuation Plan for Hurricane Katrina: Proactive Management of a Regional Evacuation

In the days preceding Hurricane Katrina in 2005, over one million people evacuated from southeast Louisiana. Preliminary evidence suggests that, given the few available routes and short advance warning, this achievement was the most successful highway-based evacuation in U.S. history. This paper presents the contraflow plan that was developed to evacuate the greater New Orleans area, the transportation goals and philosophies that underlie it, and the unique features that permitted it to be used so effectively. The plan was unprecedented in its size and scope. It required the closure of long segments of interstate freeway, forced movement of traffic onto alternative routes, established reversible flow segments of freeway that crossed state boundaries, forced coordination of parallel nonfreeway routes, and forced reconfiguration of busy urban freeway interchanges to more effectively load evacuees from the surface street network onto the interstate system. The lessons learned from this experience can be applied by emergency planning experts in their own jurisdictions.