01624632

Component

As the need to prepare for, respond to, and recover from major disruptive events continues to become more critical, the use of evacuations as a protective action strategy when confronted with life-threatening disasters is a key component of community resilience planning. While the need for and basic concepts of evacuations are straightforward and consistent across locations and hazard types, the details of planning and managing an evacuation are more varied and complex. To improve evacuation preparedness, the training of emergency managers, police, and transportation agencies becomes key. The National Disaster Preparedness Training Center, part of the network of Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) training centers is assessing the need for evacuation training among these key governmental agencies. As part of this effort, a multinational survey of evacuation planning training needs among emergency managers and those involved in transportation management and operations was recently undertaken. This paper summarizes key findings of this survey, which included 727 respondents across 136 cities and 48 states and 2 territories, to reveal the results of this training-needs self-assessment. Among the more notable findings were that while approximately 53 percent of respondents reported that their jurisdiction has an evacuation plan, 46 percent reported that they did not know or were unsure as to whether or not their community even had a plan. More detailed analyses of the survey were conducted to examine important considerations like threat exposure and the characteristics of the communities, agencies and respondents themselves to gain a better understand of the training needs. Based on this analysis, training needs and other recommendations for the development and delivery of curriculum on evacuation planning are presented.

This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ABR00 Section - Transportation Systems Resilience.

01618707

17-06408

English

21p

2017

Transportation Research Board 96th Annual Meeting

Digital/other

Figures; References; Tables

Communities; Curricula; Disaster preparedness; Disaster resilience; Evacuation; Training; Transportation departments

Emergency planning

Administration and Management; Education and Training; Security and Emergencies; Transportation (General)

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2017 Paper #17-06408

TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Dec 8 2016 12:36PM