Read or listen to any news segment lately and you are likely to find at least one story on evacuation drills. States, cities, schools and businesses have recently focused much of their attention on devising and testing the latest and greatest in evacuation plans.
In the aftermath of hurricanes Katrina and Rita, and the tsunami in Thailand, amid growing concern over a possible avian flu pandemic and with the tragic events of 9/11 still on our minds, we feel a pressing need to conduct emergency evacuation drills. While having an effective evacuation plan is vital to the safety of our citizens, it is not clear that the benefits of these physical drills even begin to justify the costs involved.
Physically evacuating people requires a tremendous amount of resources, not to mention the hidden cost of lost productivity. Moreover, these exercises are typically announced to avoid unnecessary panic. There seems to be an inherent flaw in using an announced drill to measure readiness for a sudden crisis. Those assessing the evacuation plans will never observe the true outcomes of such a plan if the individuals involved do not behave as if it were an actual emergency.
Even if the costs to perform the drills are minimal, the limited extent to which announced drills can accurately recreate emergency scenarios leads to the question: What, if anything, do we learn from executing announced drills?
Rather than spend time and money executing drills that may not mimic reality, consider using simulation technology for evacuation planning. Simulation-based analysis provides opportunities to execute, test and observe the consequences of an infinite variety of evacuation scenarios. The software relies on actual population data, building layouts and statistical distributions representing passenger movement and other behaviors that influence the evacuation process. Consequently, this technology generates accurate and viable plans that work in actual emergency situations.
Stakeholders can identify different measures of effectiveness (such as time to evacuate, percent of the population contaminated, etc.) that will define success, run the simulation and immediately review the results of the scenarios. Simulation technology provides visual output as well as a suite of reports from which decision makers can evaluate the consequences of different evacuation plans.