FEMA has released Planning Considerations: Evacuation and Shelter-in-Place: Guidance for State, Local, Tribal, and Territorial Partners today. The document draws upon the collective experience of those partners to provide relevant concepts, principals, and guidance as a resource for emergency managers and planners.
Evacuation and shelter-in-place protective actions are prompted by a variety of threats and hazards. Incident-specific circumstances drive the relevant protective actions based on a community’s demographics, infrastructure, resources, authorities, and decision-making process. Determining that an evacuation needs to take place is not an all-or-nothing approach. Lessons learned from recent disasters, to include hurricanes, wildfires, and floods, have highlighted the value of enacting a zone-phased approach to evacuation and shelter-in-place, enabling jurisdictions to move as few people as necessary. Sheltering-in-place populations that are not directly in harm’s way, rather than having them evacuate, can help jurisdictions reduce costs and resource requirements, and limit the negative impacts of evacuations, while promoting improved response and quicker re-entry and recovery.
FEMA will host a series of 60-minute webinars to discuss the document, related efforts, and answer participants’ questions. The webinars will be open to the whole community.
To view the document and for additional webinar information, please visit https://www.fema.gov/plan.
