SNOW HILL – County officials agreed to support a new education initiative designed to aid the public in evacuation situations.
The Worcester County Commissioners agreed last week to conceptually approve the “Know Your Zone” program. The FEMA endorsed program is meant to educate citizens regarding evacuation zones so they’ll know when to leave in an emergency.
“We’ve been working closely with a number of our jurisdictions that are vulnerable to storm surge and other impacts from hurricanes,” said Kyle Overly of the Maryland Emergency Management Agency.
Overly told the commissioners that he was working with 17 jurisdictions on the program, which creates simple evacuation zones—to be labeled zones A, B and C—throughout the state.
“The idea being if a hurricane is going to impact Maryland it’s going to impact more than just one jurisdiction,” Overly said.
He said Virginia had gone through a similar project last year and that Delaware would soon be doing the same. With the help of a consultant, Maryland officials have spent the last year developing a map of evacuation zones.
“These zones are based on the most up-to-date surge monitoring from the National Hurricane Center,” he said
Fred Webster, the county’s director of emergency services, said he’d met with local stakeholders—including law enforcement, public works officials, and the Maryland State Highway Administration, among others—to review the proposed evacuation zone maps.
“We tweaked those just a little bit because we feel we have a better knowledge of roads and how many people a road can handle during an evacuation so we made some minor changes to the maps in order to accommodate traffic flow as we know it on some of our secondary roads,” Webster said.
When asked about the feasibility of evacuating the zones, Webster acknowledged that evacuating Ocean City and Ocean Pines, two of the county’s most vulnerable areas, Webster acknowledged that could take 16-18 hours. He said that emergency officials would be in close contact in advance of potential storm however and that evacuations would be based on the conditions of a particular storm.
“It’s going to be a statewide process to educate people there are evacuation zones in the different areas and they need to be aware of what zone they’re in when they’re here,” he said.
