"When it comes to transportation resiliency, we return largely to planning. A 2010 report from the LSU Gulf Coast Research Center for Evacuation and Transportation Resiliency outlines measures including advance prioritization of road, rail and other repair operations, raising elevations for selected bridge projects, planning off-site storage of vulnerable assets, and flood protection for public transit lines. (For the freight community, communications is the "Achilles heel.") The report notes that the evacuation network as a whole still "lacks adequate communication and coordination across modes."
But the range of stakeholders and interests, compounded by a fickle marketplace, makes a coordinated investment in this realm a daunting task. A key problem is allocating resources, says Wolshon. Nobody wants to spend money, time, and effort on an event that may not happen, even if it seems that 100-year storms are coming at much shorter intervals. We know that nature (and we ourselves) will throw more and bigger challenges our way, but anticipating them takes imagination, and implementing them takes will and money.
Still the question we need to keep asking ourselves — if we truly agree that the likes of Hurricane Katrina "can never happen again" — is not how far ahead can we afford to plan, but how much can we afford to not plan that far ahead?"The Future of Evacuations in the Climate Change Era - CityLab
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