Assessment of Evacuation Training Needs: Targeting Instruction to Meet the Requirements of Local Communities and Agencies
As the need to prepare for, respond to, and recover from major disruptive events continues to become more critical, the use of evacuations as a protective action strategy when confronted with life-threatening disasters is a key component of community resilience planning. While the need for and basic concepts of evacuations are straightforward and consistent across locations and hazard types, the details of planning and managing an evacuation are more varied and complex. To improve evacuation preparedness, the training of emergency managers, police, and transportation agencies becomes key. The National Disaster Preparedness Training Center, part of the network of Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) training centers is assessing the need for evacuation training among these key governmental agencies. As part of this effort, a multinational survey of evacuation planning training needs among emergency managers and those involved in transportation management and operations was recently undertaken. This paper summarizes key findings of this survey, which included 727 respondents across 136 cities and 48 states and 2 territories, to reveal the results of this training-needs self-assessment. Among the more notable findings were that while approximately 53 percent of respondents reported that their jurisdiction has an evacuation plan, 46 percent reported that they did not know or were unsure as to whether or not their community even had a plan. More detailed analyses of the survey were conducted to examine important considerations like threat exposure and the characteristics of the communities, agencies and respondents themselves to gain a better understand of the training needs. Based on this analysis, training needs and other recommendations for the development and delivery of curriculum on evacuation planning are presented.
-
Supplemental Notes:
- This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ABR00 Section - Transportation Systems Resilience.
-
Corporate Authors:
500 Fifth Street, NW
Washington, DC United States 20001 -
Authors:
- Kim, Karl
- Wolshon, Brian
- Pant, Pradip
- Yamashita, Eric
- Ghimire, Jiwnath
-
Conference:
- Transportation Research Board 96th Annual Meeting
- Location: Washington DC, United States
- Date: 2017-1-8 to 2017-1-12
- Date: 2017
Language
- English
Media Info
- Media Type: Digital/other
- Features: Figures; References; Tables;
- Pagination: 21p
- Monograph Title: TRB 96th Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers
Subject/Index Terms
- TRT Terms: Communities; Curricula; Disaster preparedness; Disaster resilience; Evacuation; Training; Transportation departments
- Uncontrolled Terms: Emergency planning
- Subject Areas: Administration and Management; Education and Training; Security and Emergencies; Transportation (General);
Filing Info
- Accession Number: 01624632
- Record Type: Publication
- Report/Paper Numbers: 17-06408
- Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
- Created Date: Jan 31 2017 9:29AM