HURREVAC History
HURREVAC's origins date back to a program called 'Decide' that was developed in 1987 by John F. Townsend, a meteorologist employed by the National Weather Service in Charleston, SC. The purpose of the program was to couple NHC's forecast track data with HES clearance times and compute Evacuation Decision Times for South Carolina. Early use of the program came with Hurricane Hugo in 1989. The program was shown to some emergency managers and FEMA soon took interest in supporting the program and overseeing its expansion.
HURREVAC was at that time in DOS with rudimentary DOS graphics. Separate versions of the program had to be developed for each state. As DOS graphics improved from CGA to VGA, storm surge inundation maps were digitized and incorporated into the program. A separate wind decay tool was also developed for inland counties.
HurWin95
In 1998, Sea Island Software (a Delaware corporation formed to take over the programming and operations previously done by John Townsend) produced a Windows 95/98/NT version of HURREVAC. This consolidated program (called HurWin95) was adaptable for each state through the use of plug-ins for evacuation times and inundation graphics. It also combined coastal HURREVAC and the HURREVAC Inland Winds program into one new program.
Hurrevac2000
The scope and capabilities the program continued to grow and several years later it took on a new name of Hurrevac2000. Hurrevac2000's launch marked the beginning of East and Central Pacific storm tracking capability as well as the incorporation of rainfall forecasts--the first of a number of inland flooding tools that have been added over the years. See the Hurrevac2000 Version History for a chronological list of all the enhancements added over the past decade.
Hurrevac2010
In 2007 FEMA and USACE, together with Sea Island Software, began to explore HURREVAC modernization. Users of the program were surveyed and a 5-year strategic plan developed. Reprogramming of HURREVAC for Microsoft's .NET platform began in 2008. Nearly all of Hurrevac2000's functionality has now been ported to the new Hurrevac2010 platform which will be used for the first time during the 2010 hurricane season. See the Hurrevac2010 Overview for details on how the new program differs from Hurrevac2000.