Hope may be on the way for residents along the Gulf Coast who evacuate from hurricanes and have to put up with evacuation traffic.Brian Wolshon and Chester Wilmot, Civil and Environmental Engineering professors, as well as faculty from the E. J. Ourso College of Business, were recently awarded $833,316 during the next six years from the United States Department of Homeland Security to run the “Evacuation Models and Dynamics” project.The project will be run as part of the Center for Natural Disasters, Coastal Infrastructure, and Emergency Management led by the University of North Carolina, which is the main center out of 13 designated Homeland Security Centers of Excellence.”The project is funding us so we can conduct large regional traffic models and scenario testing of New Orleans and look at the details of traffic flow within the city and as it disperses throughout the state,” Wolshon said. “Once done, we will take all of our methods and processes and modeling expertise and apply it to the city of Houston.”Wolshon said when there is an event like Hurricane Gustav, they grab data and information from that event and target their analysis from the event, and hopefully learn lessons from it so they can better prepare for the next storm.