Florida Knows Hurricanes

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.