Evacuation Data and Other State-Specific Plug-Ins

HURREVAC Tech Note 2 - updated 5/15/2012

Although HURREVAC 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 HURREVAC:

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

Evacuation Data

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.

Beginning with HURREVAC version 1.2.1 (the 2012 Season Release), you no longer need to download HES data as a state plug-in. All clearance time scenarios are built into the program and are automatically updated as restudies are done. To view the clearance times within HURREVAC, go to BROWSERS>Evacuation Clearance Time.

Currently Evacuation Data is 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 can 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 HURREVAC'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 HURREVAC is an easy two-step process:

  1. Open HURREVAC and then enter the SETUP form using the button at top right of the program interface.
  2. Mark the states/counties you are interested in and press the Apply 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.  If updates become available for any plug-ins that you have selected, the program will download the newer versions as part of the regular polling for forecast products.

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.