New Orleans-area residents should not count on contraflow to make evacuating a hurricane easier, according to an official in the Louisiana Governor's Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness.
"They shouldn't use a call for contraflow as a trigger point in their evacuation plans," said Mike Steele with GOHSEP. "It's not something that's likely to happen in most cases."
Steele says most major hurricanes do not give them the lead time needed to make contraflow happen.
"One of the things we noticed was, you would have to order contraflow, or start the process to put contraflow in place, before the storm enters the gulf of Mexico," he explained to WWL's Tommy Tucker.
Steele said it takes about four days to coordinate with all of the agencies involved in order to prepare.
"A lot of people think it's just opening up the other side of the interstate, but there's so much more that has to happen," Steele said.
In addition to the multi-agency coordination required to make contraflow work, evacuees need to know that once they are in contraflow lanes, authorities will not let drivers exit until they have made it past Baton Rouge.
