Customizing Hurrevac2010 with Evacuation Data and Other State-Specific Plug-Ins

Hurrevac2010 Tech Note 2 - updated 5/22/2011

Although Hurrevac2010 is designed to be generic and quickly usable by all areas to track hurricanes and time arrival of various wind parameters, the program relies on certain plug-ins in order to produce evacuation decision times, show inundation areas, show river gage maps, and do other specialized duties for at-risk states.

There are 3 types of plug-ins available for Hurrevac2010:

Evacuation Data Plug-Ins
Inundation Map Plug-Ins
NOAA River Gage Map Plug-Ins

Evacuation Data Plug-Ins

FEMA/USACE Hurricane Evacuation Studies (HES) assist emergency management offices in determining who should evacuate when a hurricane threatens and when they should leave. HES clearance times (the time it takes to complete an evacuation of a vulnerable population) are needed in HURREVAC's Evacuation Decision Timing operations.

HES data is generally only available for coastal counties of hurricane-prone states.  If you don't find your location in the list of available Counties/Parishes, it is because no study has been done.  Check with your state's hurricane planner for information on if/when that might change.  This person will also know the age of your HES data and when a restudy might be planned.

Once you have downloaded HES data for one or more counties, you can use Hurrevac2010's Evacuation Clearance Time Browser to view the data within the program.

Currently Evacuation Data plug-ins are available for:

Inundation Map Plug-Ins

These are old raster-based, static maps of surge zones that have been ported from Hurrevac2000.  While the type of information on these maps is extremely useful, the crude resolution and age of those available in HURREVAC severely limit their usefulness.  Check with your county or state hurricane planner for newer versions of these maps that are often distributed in GIS or PDF formats.

Once you have downloaded an inundation map plug-in , use Hurrevac2010's Surge Map Browser under the UTILITIES heading to view available maps.

Currently Inundation Map plug-ins are available for:

NOAA River Gage Site Maps

Static (raster-based) maps are available for certain river gages within HURREVAC's River Gage Browser.  These maps consist of aerial photography showing the area around the gage that would be inundated by a 100-year flood and by a 500-year flood.

These river gage site maps are currently available for the states in FEMA Region 4, FEMA Region 6 and FEMA Region 1.

Steps for Installing Plug-Ins

Installing state-specific data in Hurrevac2010 is an easy two-step process:

  1. Open Hurrevac2010 and then enter the SETUP form using the button at top right of the program interface.
  2. Mark the states you are interested in and press the Download + Update button.


When you select State Plug-Ins here, files are downloaded to your computer from HURREVAC's support site and installed in appropriate folders under the program's data directory.  This form should also be used to update plug-ins whenever you are notified of changes from a Hurricane Evacuation Study.

Plug-ins are placed in the Application Data directory under your username. On XP machines, this directory is C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\Hurrevac2010 and on Vista and Windows7 this directory is C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Hurrevac2010. Evacuation Study Times are saved in the 'evacdata' folder and both types of maps are saved in the 'maps' folder.