New App Tells Evacuees to Turn Around, Then Turn Around Again
A real-time downgrade tracker has commuters walking briskly in both directions at once.
Within hours of the evacuation order for Typhoon Dujuan being downgraded, the meteorological agency pushed an update to its new companion app, EvacuTrack, instructing anyone still mid-evacuation to calmly reverse course and return home. Twenty minutes later it pushed another update instructing everyone who had turned around to turn around again, citing a fresh read of the pressure system.
By midafternoon, stretches of the coastal highway resembled a slow-motion pendulum, with the same families passing each other three times, waving politely each time as if greeting old neighbors on a particularly indecisive commute.
"We ask residents to remain in a state of readiness to reverse readiness," said a spokesperson, checking a phone that buzzed twice while she was speaking and required her to restart the sentence from a different direction.
EvacuTrack's centerpiece feature, a countdown clock to the next possible status change, has reportedly been reset four times without ever reaching zero, a fact the agency describes as functioning as intended.
Officials say the app's next version will include a setting that lets users evacuate toward the storm, for households who feel they've been going the wrong way all afternoon and would simply like to get it over with.