MB staff ‘simplified’ hurricane evacuation zones to get residents to actually use them

The old evacuation zones were too complex for people to understand, Myrtle Beach’s Emergency Manager Travis Glatki hypothesizes.

So this year they’ve decided to switch things up and dumb things down to see if more people will actually evacuate this time around.

According to data previously collected by his office, Glatki said in Myrtle Beach, typically about 25 percent of people will follow voluntary evacuation orders and 35 percent will follow a mandatory evacuation order from the South Carolina Governor’s Office.

If an incoming storm looks like it may hit South Carolina head-on, Glatki said he and his team will issue voluntary evacuation orders depending on residents’ zones.

Within the last year, Glatki said his office worked to update the evacuation zones, which have not been changed or modified since 2012.

“They were just really confusing,” he said. “The way that they were drawn up, one half would be in Zone A and the other half would be in Zone B, so it was just too confusing.”

The idea for modifying the zone first came from a South Carolina Emergency Management Conference three years ago. The number one concern at the conference among managers from the coastline was the evacuation zones, according to Glatki.

“For us, another issue was if people aren’t evacuating, then we need to make sure that they’re taken care of,” he said. “So that’s why we simplified it, and scaled it down a little bit.”

Glatki said he’s hoping these new evacuation zones will lead to higher percentages of people getting to safety before a storm hits.

There are now three different evacuation zones within Myrtle Beach City Limits: A, B and C.

Evacuation Zone A: Ocean Boulevard

Evacuation Zone B: Kings Highway

Evacuation Zone C: The majority of Market Common

The new evacuation zones are also listed above in descending order, so Zone A is the closest to the water and the most likely to be impacted while Zone C is furthest from the shore and least likely to experience dramatic flooding, he said.

Glatki also said he and his office, along with the South Carolina Emergency Management Division, hope these zones are easier to understand and not as complicated as their predecessors.

Before the switch up, old document s from Glatski’s office show multiple roads for each evacuation zone, as well as exceptions for mobile homes, or homes that could be adjacent to rivers in Horry County, but far away from the beach’s sandy shoreline.

For local nursing homes in the area, he said they are not required to share their evacuation plans with his office.

But, Glatki does have the ability and authority to approve hospital evacuation plans.

Grand Strand Hospital is the only Level 1 Trauma Center in Horry County, with the next closest one being in Florence.

“The new emergency manager and the staff and I decided that with Grand Strand Hospital, is when a hurricane coming, it will do more harm than good evacuating patients that are in intensive care,” he said. “So what we came up with was we put in a request with the Governor’s Office and the Department of Health and we requested a waiver.”

As a result, the hospital now has the ability to make the decision whether or not they’re going to evacuate on a storm by storm basis.

Glatki also noted that many people who don’t evacuate don’t take into account that Horry County only has four hurricane shelters available, and that none of them are operable above a Category 2 level storm.

He said he gets asked frequently if these new evacuation zones are going to affect people’s insurance policies.

The simple answer is he doesn’t know, and he recommends contacting individual insurance providers to find out.

By dumbing down each evacuation zone, the hope is that more people can safely leave town, leading to fewer emergencies during a large tropical storm.