Hurricane evacuation: It would take region 36 hours

As the hurricane season bears down on Hampton Roads, local transportation officials say the state's evacuation plan is inadequate and could leave thousands of residents stranded.

If a major hurricane were to hit, state studies show it would take 36 hours to evacuate at-risk residents in South Hampton Roads, in part because the state plan calls for closing the northbound lanes of the Monitor-Merrimac Memorial Bridge-Tunnel for traffic congestion reasons.

"Thirty-six hours is not reasonable," said Rob Case, principal transportation engineer for the Hampton Roads Transportation Planning Organization. "That means you'd be sitting in your car for up to 30 hours, then you'd probably run out of gas. Most wouldn't, though, because they'd turn around and go back home.

"Either way, that's not good."

Virginia's Hurricane Emergency Response Plan projects that nearly 750,000 people would need to evacuate their homes for a major hurricane in Hampton Roads, dumping nearly 300,000 vehicles on the roads. The plan calls for reversing eastbound lanes of Interstate 64 starting at the Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel through the Peninsula to Richmond. South Hampton Roads residents would use the contraflow lanes.

The transportation planning group has recommended that the Virginia Department of Transportation keep the Monitor-Merrimac open, as well as reverse the eastbound lanes on U.S. 58/460 from Bowers Hill to the end of the Suffolk bypass.

The planning group's analysis shows that the overall evacuation time would drop by seven hours using the Monitor-Merrimac in addition to the Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel. South Hampton Roads evacuation times would fall from 36 hours to 29 hours, but Peninsula times would rise to 24 hours from 17 hours.

The group also concluded that allowing motorists to travel west on the U.S. 58/460 eastbound lanes would reduce the overall clearance time by 13 hours. The Peninsula's evacuation time would remain at 17 hours, while the south side's time would decrease from 36 hours to 23 hours.

For its proposed changes, the planning agency used the same model the state used for projecting evacuation times.

The state is aware of deficiencies in its plan and is studying both options, said Stephany Hanshaw, regional traffic operations manager for the Virginia Department of Transportation.

"If everyone who's at risk decided to leave, we would have very real challenges with our transportation network," he said.

VDOT is in its third phase of studying the evacuation of Hampton Roads.

"We're trying to figure out ways to eke out more capacity out of the existing network," Hanshaw said. "We're looking at all these options to see what's most efficient."

Hanshaw said the current plan closes the northbound Monitor-Merrimac because the extra traffic could cause bottlenecks on I-64 where the interstate narrows to two lanes.

And while VDOT's modeling has not been completed yet, state officials have already agreed that reversing U.S. 58/460 would be helpful. However, $7 million in improvements would be necessary to make that happen - including passovers to switch traffic at each end and gates at interchanges - and only $600,000 has been allocated over the next six years.

The strongest hurricane to hit Hampton Roads in recent decades was Hurricane Donna, a Category 2 storm, in 1960. A Category 2 storm has winds of 96 to 110 mph with storm surge of 6 to 8 feet.

Other Category 2 storms - such as Isabel in 2003, Floyd in 1999 and Gloria in 1985 - threatened to strike the metro area but weakened to Category 1 by the time they reached the region's most populous areas.

Debbie Messina, (757) 446-2588, debbie.messina@pilotonline.com