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State plans hurricane evacuation drill on I-4
By Times staff writer TAMPA -- Interstate 4 will be the site of a weekend drill to determine how long it would take to turn the highway into a one-way evacuation route from the Tampa Bay area if a hurricane were bearing down. But, as they say on the radio, this is only a test. Traffic will not be disrupted. About 100 National Guard troops, 125 Florida Highway Patrol troopers and 50 to 60 Department of Transportation workers will take up posts Saturday along the 63 miles of highway from Tampa to Orlando. They will simulate coordination and control of traffic, as they would if a hurricane were approaching the state's west coast. The unarmed soldiers, along with Humvees, trucks and other equipment, will be stationed at highway ramps, and troopers and DOT workers will share space with nearly 3,000 orange traffic cones stacked along the freeway shoulders. "It's a test to see how long it's going to take to deploy the cones and personnel to direct traffic at the interchanges," said Marian Pscion, spokeswoman for the Department of Transportation. "The National Guard is going to be out there with a lot of heavy equipment, and after Sept. 11, we don't want people to be alarmed." Thirty-five lighted message boards will let motorists know what's going on. No barricades will be put in place, and the freeway will remain open to normal traffic, Pscion said. Dave Bilodeau, emergency management director in Pinellas County, said there would be no simulations on I-275, and it was unlikely that any interstate ever would be turned into a one-way avenue of evacuation because it takes too long to set up. "Every time there's a new governor, we go through a new evacuation plan. Quite frankly, it's never done any good," Bilodeau said. "All it would accomplish is to make traffic go twice as fast on the one-way road and then twice as slow when it bumps into two-way traffic." Bilodeau said if a hurricane really were bearing down on the Tampa Bay area, plans for converting an interstate to one-way would have to begin at least 48 hours in advance, before the exact storm track is even known. "First, the governor has to deploy the National Guard, and then they have to remove all the concrete median barriers so that all the traffic can get going the same way," Bilodeau said. "It's impossible. Totally impossible. "The good thing about this is that we'll try it, find out it doesn't work and then go back to the old plan of getting people to move themselves out of harm's way by starting early, long before a storm arrives." When Hurricane Floyd moved up the state's east coast in 1999 and 3-million people fled, the resulting gridlock spawned the one-way interstate plan. Similar exercises have been conducted on other state highways, starting with Interstate 10 between Jacksonville and Tallahassee two years ago. The evacuation plan is a last resort, to be used only before a Category 4 or 5 hurricane makes landfall. A Category 4 has maximum sustained winds of 131 to 155 mph; Category 5 winds exceed 155 mph. Hurricane season began June 1 and ends Nov. 30. The test will start at 8 a.m. Saturday and is expected to last six to eight hours.
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From the Times state desk
From the state wire
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