North Carolina DoT wins top award for hurricane response

4775 North Carolina Department of Transportation (NCDoT) has won a major award for its work responding to Hurricane Florence last year.

The organisation was the overall trophy winner – up against 60 other submissions - at the first annual Transportation Systems Management and Operations (TSMO) Awards, run by the US National Operations Center of Excellence (NOCoE).

The gong was presented to Jennifer Portanova, NCDoT state systems operations engineer, at the 2019 856 Transportation Research Board annual meeting in Washington, DC this week.

Last September, more than a million people were safely evacuated in advance of the storm and NCDoT continued to keep the public informed of road closures and collapses as it swept through the US state.

“There’s no doubt, lives were saved because of the crucial work done by our colleagues at NCDoT,” says NOCoE managing director Patrick Son. “Their preparation and response were amazing, coordinating, moving and informing millions of people. This is a case where things could have gone horribly wrong and instead, the coalition of TSMO practitioners, traffic managers, first responders and partners had an incredibly positive outcome.”

He added that the quality of submissions “highlights the growing understanding and influence of TSMO as a saver of lives, time and money”.

As well as taking the top prize, NCDoT won the ‘Major incident or special event planning and response’ category. Other winners were:

• Improving your agency’s TSMO capabilities – ITS Heartland Chapter of ITS America and HDR - ITS Heartland’s TSMO University Educational Program

• Best TSMO project (creative solution) – Arizona Department of Transportation - US-60 Restripe Project

• Public Communications – Oregon Department of Transportation - @OregonTIMResponders