Floridians are the hurricane experts, even if those in South Carolina would disagree. When we went to Hurricane Katrina, the overwhelming response was “The experts from Florida are here, hurray.” The police in Alabama and Mississippi were still “commandeering” our truckloads of supplies as they travelled down the highway, to the point that we had to have armed escorts for them.
Even so, our state is constantly looking for better ways to respond and handle hurricane responses. A few years ago, Florida tried a plan called “contraflow” for evacuation routes. This plan was that both sides of a highway would be used for evacuating the danger zones along the coast, thus doubling the number of lanes available for evacuation. It turns out that this plan didn’t work as well as hoped, so the state is trying out a new plan called “ESU,” or Emergency Shoulder Use.
ESU is a plan where any vehicle that isn’t a tractor-trailer can use the road shoulders, sometimes called “emergency lanes” as an extra lane of travel. This makes two extra lanes available for traffic.
This enables two lanes to become four.
When loads of supplies are travelling and using these lanes to get through traffic, they are escorted by highway patrolmen. This is especially true for fuel deliveries to the fuel stops along Florida’s main emergency routes: the service plazas on Florida’s Ronald Reagan Turnpike, along with selected fuel stops on I-75 and I-95, the main routes for the west and east coasts, respectively.
So when you see police escorting trucks of fuel and supplies, it isn’t due to crime or hijacking of trucks, it is merely to help them get through the logjammed traffic.
Hope this makes things a bit more clear.
5 Comments
Fishlaw · October 9, 2024 at 9:45 am
What basis did the cops in Alabama have for taking stuff going to Florida?
Divemedic · October 9, 2024 at 10:56 am
It was supplies going from Florida to Mississippi along I-10. Florida and Georgia responded to Mississippi and Alabama, while responders from Texas and California were responsible for Louisiana.
Grumpy51 · October 9, 2024 at 11:15 am
What was major issue with contra-flow?? TX has it and TMK, works “OK”
EN2 SS · October 10, 2024 at 6:45 am
Back in Rita days in Houston, I was returning from my scheduled run to home. The results of ContraFlow? Both sides of the freeways are sitting/parked for literally days. It took me eight hours to get from Dallas, where I dropped my trailer for the loads safety, to get to Houston, a normal two and half hours. Running the backroads, they were backed up for hours and the clowns would pull out to pass on two lane roads and expect me to drive my tractor into the bar ditch to let them pass. I’ve never evacuated for a storm and it would take a cataclysmic one in my opinion to think about running. How many will survive sitting on the highways without fuel and no place to go?
Grumpy51 · October 10, 2024 at 8:13 am
Yep, Rita is the one where several elderly died in a commercial bus that caught fire….. Good to know that it (contraflow) didn’t work that well….. When you’re dealing with a couple million people leaving all at once, it ain’t gonna go well – be first or stuck.
One of the lessons stated in theplacewithnoname was to load fuel about 100 miles away from incident. Everyone else is loading fuel close in, resulting in long lines, and delayed departures.
I try to keep all of my fuel tanks > ½, but then also have several fuel cans to continue refueling until I can get well out of the “mob zone”.
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