No emergency gridlock foreseen for Utah

Utah officials are betting mass evacuations like those that gridlocked Houston highways before Hurricane Rita won't hit roadways here.

In fact they are so confident that a large-scale exodus won't happen that Salt Lake County's Emergency Management Plan doesn't offer any evacuation plan.

"It certainly wouldn't hurt to have a plan, but in emergency planning you're limited in resources, and you want to devote your time to what is most likely to happen," said Lt. Robert Sampson, former homeland security manager for the county. "After what happened in the Southeast, it's so hard to anticipate, but I would never think we'll be in the same position, based on our geography."

Rather than hurricanes with days of warning, the Wasatch Front is susceptible to floods, brush fires, chemical spills and of course, an earthquake. Those potential disasters don't lend themselves to mass evacuations or to much lead time to vacate the county, said Bob Halloran, emergency services manager for the Unified Fire Authority.

Instead, localized evacuations would be assessed on a case-by-case basis before any evacuation order was issued, he said.

"If earthquakes would give us three days' advance notice, maybe we could have an evacuation plan. But we cannot predict when or where," Halloran said. "Even in an earthquake, few residents would ever want to evacuate or leave their homes. It would be nothing on the scale you would have in Houston."

Traffic flow

A large-scale evacuation isn't at the top of the state's planning priority list either, said Utah Department of Transportation spokesman Nile Easton.

But there are ways to manage a large-scale movement of people.

One of the benefits of living in Salt Lake County is that I-80 and I-15 converge at the freeways' "spaghetti bowl" interchange and go in four directions, said Easton. To relieve congestion, traffic can be guided in each of those directions, instead of the one-way traffic flow that happened during the evacuation of Houston.

Also, lanes can be reversed so traffic could move in the same direction on both sides of the freeway.

"It would be slow going, but traffic would be moving," Easton said. Capacity on I-15 and I-80 is about 2,000 cars per lane per hour — about the equivalent of evening traffic into Utah County.