SOUTHEAST TEXAS HURRICANE EVACUATION STUDY RE-STUDY VULNERABILTY, BEHAVIORAL, SHELTER, and TRANSPORTATION ANALYSES | W81EWF 23 SOI 0011

Opportunity Information: Apply for W81EWF 23 SOI 0011

The SOUTHEAST TEXAS HURRICANE EVACUATION STUDY RE-STUDY opportunity (Funding Opportunity Number W81EWF 23 SOI 0011) is a Department of Defense, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) cooperative agreement intended to support the National Hurricane Program (NHP) in updating key components of the Hurricane Evacuation Study (HES) for Southeast Texas. The award is framed as applied research and planning support in the Science and Technology / research and development category (CFDA 12.630), with an anticipated single award (Expected Awards: 1) and an award ceiling of $150,000. The work is structured around a base year focused on coordination and two foundational analyses, with option year work covering shelter and transportation modeling, plus an optional task to package results for broad stakeholder use. The overall aim is practical: give emergency managers updated evacuation zones, better estimates of who evacuates and when, more realistic shelter demand and capacity assumptions, and transportation clearance times that can directly inform real-world evacuation decisions.

A central theme across the entire scope is close coordination with USACE Galveston District and with state and local stakeholders who use hurricane evacuation products. The contractor is expected to maintain steady, direct coordination with the Galveston District, and to route deliverables to the District for distribution. Any outreach or coordination with non-USACE entities has to be documented and summarized for the USACE Project Manager, with contact and coordination summaries updated alongside routine status reporting. In other words, this is not a standalone academic exercise; it is meant to be integrated into an operational planning ecosystem where transparency of sources, assumptions, and stakeholder inputs matters.

In the base year, the first major technical piece is an updated Vulnerability Analysis. This task focuses on identifying which areas, populations, critical infrastructure, and facilities are most at risk from hurricane storm surge (coastal flooding), inland riverine flooding, and wind impacts under a range of hurricane and tropical storm scenarios. The contractor is expected to use inundation (storm tide) maps and FEMA floodplain maps generated through the companion Hazards Analysis to identify surge-vulnerable areas that may require evacuation for specific storm threats. The work also includes assessing whether evacuation routes themselves are vulnerable, such as roadways and bridges that could be cut off by freshwater flooding and therefore reduce or delay outbound traffic. A key deliverable tied to this vulnerability work is support to local and state emergency management agencies in developing new evacuation zones or refining existing ones. These zones are treated as the fundamental building blocks for the entire study because they are used to: quantify vulnerable populations, define origins and destinations for traffic modeling, estimate shelter demand, and provide an actionable geography for officials to issue clear evacuation instructions. The opportunity emphasizes that zones should be easy to communicate and ideally standardized across jurisdictions through coordinated layouts, consistent naming conventions, color coding, and labeling that can be repeated by emergency managers and media. The vulnerability work also explicitly calls for research and development to better identify and integrate disadvantaged community vulnerabilities throughout the HES process, including during evacuation zone design, along with documenting best practices for zone development in partnership with local, state, and federal entities.

Also in the base year is the Behavioral Analysis, which is meant to translate how people actually respond to hurricane threats into standardized inputs suitable for shelter planning and transportation modeling. The study relies on behavioral assumptions such as who evacuates, who stays, how quickly people leave after an order, where evacuees go, what routes they use, and how many vehicles they take. For this re-study, the contractor is not expected to field a new phone survey; instead, they must leverage existing behavioral survey results and any other available datasets, then work closely with stakeholders to develop low, medium, and high ranges for key behavioral parameters. At minimum, the contractor must quantify and document in tables and a summary report: evacuation participation rates (including both vulnerable populations and "shadow evacuees" from outside official risk areas, plus tourists), public shelter participation rates, response times, destination percentages (weights) including route usage shares, and vehicle usage rates. The scope goes beyond simple counts by calling for details like evacuees per household and reasons households choose to evacuate, and it encourages consideration of factors such as perceived shelter accessibility and availability of medical care when estimating shelter use. The opportunity also asks for research and development into improved methodologies for establishing the low/medium/high behavioral ranges so that subsequent modeling can better reflect uncertainty and real-world variability.

In the option year, the Shelter Analysis uses outputs from hazards, vulnerability, and behavioral work to estimate how many people will seek public shelter and how many shelter spaces are available. This task is not just a capacity inventory; it is also intended to inform the transportation analysis by providing shelter-related assumptions that affect clearance times (for example, how many evacuees are traveling shorter distances to local shelters versus leaving the region). The shelter work is expected to address both shelter demand and the vulnerability of shelter facilities themselves to storm surge and flooding, since shelters located in threatened areas may not be viable in certain scenarios. The opportunity highlights the need for targeted research and development to identify reliable data sources for shelter demand and capacity, with special attention to special needs populations and disadvantaged communities, reflecting a broader objective of ensuring evacuation plans account for equity and access constraints.

The other option year pillar is the Transportation Analysis, which is responsible for calculating evacuation clearance times for a range of hurricane threats. Clearance time is the time needed to safely move evacuees out of risk areas given roadway capacity, traffic demand, behavioral response timing, traffic control measures, and destination patterns. This task includes defining and validating the evacuation roadway network, evaluating congestion and traffic patterns, and assessing traffic management strategies and potential roadway modifications that could improve flow. Importantly, the analysis is not limited to the immediate coastal study area; it must also consider inland roads and intersections that can become bottlenecks or critical congestion points for evacuees moving away from the coast, even if those locations lie outside the primary geographic boundary. A major implementation requirement is that transportation results must be readily ingestible into HURREVAC, the NHP online decision-support tool used by emergency managers to time and tailor evacuation orders. The scope also calls for coordination with stakeholders to identify key data sources for network development and scenario building, recommendations to improve use of the NHP transportation model (RtePM) that underpins clearance time evaluation, and research into the relationship between socially vulnerable populations and clearance times, with an expectation that these relationships can be investigated and quantified rather than treated as vague qualitative considerations.

Finally, there is an optional task to produce an HES Results Summary Report mechanism that explains how the study was performed and consolidates key outputs in a form stakeholders can use. This deliverable is meant to include methodologies and key results from each component, supported by maps, diagrams, and tables, and to be distributed to federal, state, and local hurricane evacuation planners and decision-makers within the study area. The content and level of detail are intended to be shaped through close coordination with USACE, FEMA, and other stakeholders, and the opportunity specifically notes potential inclusions such as links to deeper component reports, storm surge visualization maps, and a web-based dissemination format like a GIS dashboard or story map. There is also an explicit expectation to explore how to integrate the summary report into HURREVAC so that the study results do not just sit on a shelf but become part of the tool emergency managers already rely on during planning and response.

• The Department of Defense, Dept. of the Army -- Corps of Engineers in the science and technology and other research and development sector is offering a public funding opportunity titled "SOUTHEAST TEXAS HURRICANE EVACUATION STUDY RE-STUDY VULNERABILTY, BEHAVIORAL, SHELTER, and TRANSPORTATION ANALYSES" and is now available to receive applicants.
• Interested and eligible applicants and submit their applications by referencing the CFDA number(s): 12.630.
• This funding opportunity was created on May 19, 2023.
• Applicants must submit their applications by Jul 18, 2023. (Agency may still review applications by suitable applicants for the remaining/unused allocated funding in 2026.)
• Each selected applicant is eligible to receive up to $150,000.00 in funding.
• The number of recipients for this funding is limited to 1 candidate(s).
• Eligible applicants include: Others (see text field entitled Additional Information on Eligibility for clarification).

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