With new hurricane maps, more Tampa Bay residents will evacuate

Emergency officials rolled out retooled hurricane evacuation maps for Tampa Bay last week that could change whether you can stay home or flee from an approaching storm.

The bottom line: Even if you knew your evacuation zone last season, you need to check this year.

More accurate elevation readings and more detailed computer models of storm surge created some major changes for residents living in evacuation zones from Manatee to Citrus counties.

Evacuation zones are set according to how high storm surge flooding will reach for each category of hurricane. Zone A corresponds to the weakest of hurricanes, Zone B to the next category and so on up to Zone E for the most destructive hurricane category.

Some people who were able to ride out a Category 2 hurricane with winds up to 110 mph at home now would be told to head for higher ground in a Category 1 storm with winds reaching only 95 mph.

Others, such as residents of Fish Hawk Ranch who would have been ordered to evacuate for a monster Category 5 hurricane with winds topping 155 mph last year won't have to leave.

And about 200,000 people in Pasco, Hillsborough, Pinellas and Manatee counties who never had to worry about evacuating would need to evacuate for an extremely rare but devastating Category 5 storm like Hurricane Andrew.

Those extra people bring the total number of residents in the four counties ordered to leave for a Category 5 to 1.9 million.

Most of the people seeing their evacuation zones changed would have to leave for less powerful storms than previous years, said Holley Wade, spokeswoman for Hillsborough County Emergency Management.

But people living in zones evacuated for only the strongest of storms have no guarantee they won't be told to leave. Emergency management officials are cautious when issuing evacuation orders and may order a larger evacuation than the category of the approaching storm.

Emergency management agencies in the Tampa Bay area are looking at how the changes will impact the region's already lengthy evacuation times.

"We're still doing an analysis but we're anticipating some impact. We're not sure exactly what," said Tom Iovino, a Pinellas County spokesman.

For Ineca Wetherington who lives south of Gandy Boulevard, the changes mean she may not be able to ride out as many storms at home. Last season, the evacuation maps placed her in Zone C.
This year, she is in Zone B.

"I think we'll have to leave more often," she said.

The change isn't likely to alter whether Jack Hopkins will leave his home south of Gandy if a storm threatens, though he said he will check if his evacuation zone changed.

He and his wife evacuated for Hurricane Elena in 1985 and Hurricane Charley in 2004.

"We would go again," he said.

In Pinellas County, 54,332 of the parcels of land affected by the new evacuation zones would be told to leave for a less powerful storm than before.

In Hillsborough County, 49,933 of the parcels affected moved to a more vulnerable evacuation zone.

Changes in evacuation zones don't affect insurance rates. Flood zones that trigger mandatory flood insurance are based on freshwater flooding such as lakes, rivers or excessive rainfall, not from a hurricane's storm surge.

The changes may not have much effect on people living in the A and B evacuation zones who are more likely to heed evacuation orders, said Pasco County Emergency Management Director Jim Martin.

"If we call for it, they will go," he said.

Some of the zone changes come from new airborne radar measurements of elevation that can track changes of 1 foot. The old maps were based on 5-foot changes in elevation.

But the biggest change resulted from revised models the National Hurricane Center uses to predict storm surge, said Betti Johnson who handles emergency management for the Tampa Bay Regional Planning Council.

"They always kind of modeled average hurricanes, average size, average speed," she said.

The new models took more data into account, projecting the potential surge for more sizes, strengths, speeds and directions of hurricanes, all factors that can affect the height of storm surge.

The old models used the projected surge from 735 variations of hypothetical storms. Models that produced the new maps used more than 12,000, Johnson said.

The result is a better estimate of how far inland storm surge or the wall of water a hurricane creates will reach.

"These are the most accurate maps that we ever had," Wade said.

With only a little more than a week to go before the June 1 start of the hurricane season, officials have to scramble to let people know their evacuation zones may have changed.

Hillsborough County's hurricane guide should be printed before the season's start and available at post offices and libraries.

Another change people will notice are different colors used to delineate evacuation zones. The old maps used a pastel purple hue for Zone A, the lowest zone. Now, Zone A is red to indicate it's the most dangerous. Colors for other zones also changed.

"That's going to be the tough one for us. Citizens are so used to purple being level A," Iovino said.

But Martin likes it.

"I like the idea of red, that this is danger. That's probably a pretty good change," he said.