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The Miami Herald posted this story. Built for bottleneck: Is Florida growing too fast to evacuate ...
The article made a good point that I hadn't considered. A good evacuation plan does not require 10 million people to drive 600-1000 miles away. It means driving 10-20 miles inland to a shelter. In south Florida, 10-20 miles inland puts you in the Everglades or Big Cypress Swamp. Those are really bad places to build 10000 shelter buildings, holding 1000 people each.
But then I thought of I75. It is an elevated roadway that crosses south Florida east-west. Suppose we told people to drive onto I75 and park on the highway. Just that one highway could park 250000 passenger cars (200 miles * 6 lanes * 5280 / 25 feet per car). Alligator Alley and the Florida Turnpike Could also be used.
Perhaps Quonset-hut-like shelters could deploy to shelter the parked cars and to provide services. Maybe not. I'm short on details other than the following two thoughts.
The article made a good point that I hadn't considered. A good evacuation plan does not require 10 million people to drive 600-1000 miles away. It means driving 10-20 miles inland to a shelter. In south Florida, 10-20 miles inland puts you in the Everglades or Big Cypress Swamp. Those are really bad places to build 10000 shelter buildings, holding 1000 people each.
But then I thought of I75. It is an elevated roadway that crosses south Florida east-west. Suppose we told people to drive onto I75 and park on the highway. Just that one highway could park 250000 passenger cars (200 miles * 6 lanes * 5280 / 25 feet per car). Alligator Alley and the Florida Turnpike Could also be used.
Perhaps Quonset-hut-like shelters could deploy to shelter the parked cars and to provide services. Maybe not. I'm short on details other than the following two thoughts.
- A good plan would make use of our highways and private vehicles as resources to help provide the shelter, rather than being part of the problems to overcome.
- The engineering challenges to make such a plan practical and affordable would be enormous. I suspect that many of my fellow engineers would relish being assigned to the project to think such a plan through, complete the design, then implement it.
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