COLUMBIA, S.C. — State agencies spent Thursday testing themselves with a full scale hurricane evacuation exercise.
The exercise was conducted by the South Carolina Department of Transportation and the South Carolina Highway Patrol. To be clear, no lanes are actually reversed during these annual events: they just simulate what they would do with crews along several key points on the interstate and highways.
The rehearsal saw them place traffic control devices along portions of I-26 between Columbia and Charleston; US 21 and US 278 in Beaufort County; and US 501 in Horry County. The barrels and cones are placed along roadsides and shoulders and no traffic disruptions take place.
Lane reversals would happen if the governor were to issue a mandatory evacuation order for the state's coast. If that were to take place, all lanes of Interstate 26, for example, would flow westward from Charleston to Columbia, allowing as many people as possible to leave the area and move further inland quickly.
SCDOT says they drivers are encouraged to identify their evacuation routes well ahead of an actual evacuation, and can do so on the website here.
The state has had to use the procedure a few times, mostly recently in 2018 and 2019, when the state was threatened by Hurricane Florence and Hurricane Dorian, respectively.
The state began doing reversals in the wake of the evacuation from Hurricane Floyd in 1999, which saw drivers stranded for hours on key roads near the coast as they tried to flee the storm. At the time, traffic was flowing in both directions which hampered that effort to move out.