The New Orleans Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness (NOHSEP) joined local, state and federal public safety officials to host the first full-scale exercise of the City Assisted Evacuation system at the New Orleans Ernest N. Morial Convention Center.
New Orleans Office of Homeland Security turned the city’s convention center into a “movie set” May 17 when it took up an entire exhibition hall to simulate a hurricane emergency center to better prepare community members for disastrous storms.
“We needed to be able to replicate that environment,” said Aaron Miller, director of New Orleans Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness. “A venue like the convention center is the only place that you can do that.”
Such evacuation exercises are key to help people successfully escaping destructive hurricanes such as Hurricane Katrina that devastated New Orleans in 2005, killing roughly 570 people and destroying 130,000 housing units in the city.
“New Orleans' main threat every year is from hurricanes,” Miller said.
The Union Passenger Terminal (UPT) is where evacuees will go in the event of big storms, so Miller’s office — along with state and federal agencies, including the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) — utilized the New Orleans Ernest N. Morial Convention Center to build a replica of the UPT for the exercise.
A total of 109,000 sq. ft. of the 1.1 million sq. ft. of exhibition space at the convention center was used for the event.
The UPT is the main hub of transportation in New Orleans, making it the perfect place for people to go for an evacuation, Miller said. However, authorities can’t on any given day shut down the UPT for training, and that’s why the convention center was used instead.
“One of the things we wanted to do is replicate the space that we normally work in. We had the convention center set up soft walls that replicate the (passenger) terminal walls,” Miller said. “We had entrances to the UPT doors that are usually there. By having the doors of the convention center hall in the right place, it worked out well. It’s almost like creating a movie set.”
Nearly 500 volunteers showed up to take part in the exercise, acting as community members, and more than 100 first responders and nonprofit workers also played roles in the evacuation plan, Miller said. Volunteers were given free parking and lunch for their time. The exercise took about eight hours to complete.
The floor plan was set up in a queuing system with a line where community members who needed assistance could register. Rooms also were set up for those who would need medical treatment.
“We had a space where people registered their pets,” Miller said.
The entire space was designed to assist an estimated 35,000 residents in need of evacuation assistance. The population of New Orleans is roughly 397,000. The entire metro area has nearly 1.2 million people, but it’s those with medical needs, no cars and multigenerational homes that make up the identified 35,000 who would go through the evacuation system, Miller said.
The convention center is no stranger to emergency preparedness, said Brett Slocum, assistant director of public safety at the New Orleans Earnest N. Morial Convention Center.
“This required preparation for us in public safety,” he said. “We regularly work with the city and state. They are not foreign partners to us at all. We work with them in this building all the time.”
The convention center staff all followed procedure as given to them by Miller’s team.
“This was really specific to them. We provided coordination with our sales team and our event team. We had limited action. They knew exactly what to do,” Slocum said. They were very well organized.”
The evacuation exercise cost $500,000 to conduct — funded by grant money from U.S DOT Federal Transit Administration.
The biggest, and most worrisome, hurricane since Hurricane Katrina was Hurricane Gustav in 2008. Luckily the hurricane didn’t hit NOLA as hard as many expected, Miller said.
“It glanced us. We didn’t end up receiving the largest affects. Since 2008, the city has not implemented the city’s evacuation plan,” Miller said, noting why it was so important for last week’s evacuation.
Since Hurricane Katrina ripped through NOLA, the city now has a new $14-billion levy system to protect it from flooding, such as the roughly 15 feet of water that engulfed parts of New Orleans.
Additionally, a $2-billion drainage system also was built to move water out of the city, Miller said.
“The most important lessons that we learned is you have to reduce the risk, and you have to remove the barriers for people in this community,” he said.