May
23, 2007 Brian Wolshon,
associate
professor of civil and environmental engineering at LSU and member of
the Thanks to his
expertise,
prominence in the field and continued efforts, Wolshon is leading the
way for
LSU's students and faculty to collaborate with one of the premier
research
institutions in the U.S. B the Los Alamos National Laboratory. The two institutions
signed a
memorandum of agreement last year, allowing faculty, post-doctoral
researchers
and eventually even graduate students to have access to the
cutting-edge
facilities and distinguished experts in residence at "They're very
interested in
what we're doing here, and view our participation as an important piece
of
accomplishing their goals," said Wolshon. Collaboration with The grant will fund
Wolshon and
his team's continued efforts to model the traffic patterns of These places are
watching our
work very eagerly, waiting to see if they'll be able to use this," he
said. While such cities
may not have
the same need for evacuations due to hurricanes, the hope is that this
technology can be applied to homeland security situations, too. "There
has
to be a way to get everyone out of a city in case of emergency. Places
with
concentrated population levels definitely need to have a plan, no
matter how
far-fetched the idea of a terrorist event might be," Wolshon said. "Think about As a pioneer in the
field,
Wolshon truly has become the man with the plan for emergency
evacuations.
"About six or eight years ago, no one had done any research on
evacuations. The general mindset seemed to be that there wasn't any
need for
planning B people could just leave whichever way they wanted," he said.
"There was no management involved." Getting in on the ground floor,
he quickly established himself as a national leader after Hurricane
Ivan in
2004, when untested traffic plans resulted in major gridlock on primary
evacuation routes. "Because of his work
after
Ivan, the Katrina vehicular evacuation was the largest, most successful
evacuation in New Orleans B and possibly U.S. B history," said Marc
Levitan, director of the "It wasn't perfect.
There
were major flaws, and people got stuck, but it was far better than
previous
evacuation attempts," Wolshon said. "Brian is one of our
biggest
success stories. He had never done any research into evacuations until
the
Hurricane Center asked him to collaborate on the big National Science
Foundation proposal for hurricane engineering about six years ago,
before
evacuation was on anyone's radar," said Levitan. "Fast forward to
today, and Brian is recognized worldwide as probably the top traffic
engineer
in the world on this very hot topic." Wolshon also founded
and chairs
the Emergency Evacuation Committee of the Transportation Research Board
of the
National Academies, has done most of the seminal work in contraflow
evacuations, has numerous publications and students working in this
area and is
appointed to federal panels and commissions on emergency evacuations. Other countries have
started to
take notice of the work being done by Wolshon and his LSU team, most
notably LSU researchers
involved in this
collaboration will have the unique opportunity to see their work being
applied
in a relatively short period of time. "As an academic, a lot of times
you
labor in obscurity. The greatest thing about our work is that stuff we
worked
on only three years ago is already being implemented. States have
already
started to make changes in the way they handle evacuations," he said. And that is the most
important
part of the plan. "We want people to use our discoveries and models,"
said Wolshon. "We want to save lives."
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