“Do a shift to the right,’’ said Donald E. McGough, Boston’s director of emergency preparedness, instructing Schwartz to move the storm’s track 100 miles east. “I’m an optimist. Now it skirts the Cape.’’
For the first time, Boston’s emergency management team is preparing for a storm with Hurrevac, a federally funded computer program that does more than the weather soothsayers on the television news. It allows government officials to manipulate real-time data from the National Hurricane Center to determine how subtle changes in the path of a storm can have a big impact on the city of Boston. The software also includes evacuation estimates that will warn officials how long it will take residents to leave a coastal neighborhood, alerting officials to the timetable they will have to make a decision.
“You can graphically click ahead through each hour and see how far the tropical storm-force winds extend or what category a storm it will be,’’ said Paul Morey, hurricane program manager for the Federal Emergency Management Agency. “It doesn’t make decisions for you, but it helps local governments make decisions.’’
First developed as a rudimentary computer program in that late 1980s, Hurrevac has been used for decades in hurricane-prone regions of the United States. The program, restricted to government use, now has 10,000 registered users from Maine to the Caribbean, Hawaii to Japan, said Michael Schuster, hurricane program manager for the US Army Corps of Engineers.
Previously, Boston relied on other government agencies to analyze data from Hurrevac, but the city recently sent Schwartz and other staffers for training to learn how to analyze the data.
