Building Evacuation Capability in Lone Tree
Designing a city-wide evacuation plan for execution under real-world conditions
The Situation
The City of Lone Tree, Colorado, set out to develop a comprehensive yet actionable plan for a city-wide evacuation—one that could be executed under real-world constraints, not simply documented on paper.
As a growing city, Lone Tree recognized that any large-scale evacuation would quickly exceed its internal resources. Success would depend on a plan that scaled with the city’s capabilities while enabling clear coordination with regional partners as additional support was required.
Recognizing both the life safety importance of evacuation and the limits of their existing institutional knowledge, the City engaged The CP Journal to guide a structured planning process—one focused on decision-making, coordination, and execution.
The CP Journal’s Approach
The CP Journal led a planning process that deliberately bridged executive decision-making and operational execution, ensuring the evacuation plan could be articulated at the leadership level and applied in field environments.
The effort began with structured interviews with five City executives and public safety leaders, focused on leadership priorities, decision thresholds, coordination expectations, and risk tolerance related to a city-wide evacuation. This step grounded the planning effort in the realities faced by those ultimately accountable for public safety outcomes.
Insights from these interviews were used to shape the scope, emphasis, objectives, and structure of the plan, ensuring that planning products supported the decisions leaders would need to make before, during, and after an evacuation.
From there, The CP Journal facilitated a sequenced planning process, including initial, midterm, and final planning meetings with the core planning team, supported by seven functional workgroup sessions. In total, the effort engaged 15 departments, agencies, and organizations with workgroups focused on developing the job aids, tools, and coordination mechanisms required to translate strategy into action under time pressure.
According to Patrick Van Horne, the lead consultant on the project:
“The most effective evacuation plans reflect how an organization actually operates under pressure, not how a template says it should. What stood out in Lone Tree was the City’s willingness to bring the right decision-makers into the process early and be explicit about how they expect to operate. That clarity allowed us to tailor the planning effort to their realities.”
Meet the Client | Lone Tree, CO
Lone Tree is a growing suburban city in the south Denver metro area, strategically located at the junction of Interstate 25 and C-470—two of the region’s most critical transportation corridors. This positioning makes Lone Tree both a residential community and a regional access point, with daily population fluctuations driven by commuters, visitors, and through-traffic.
The City is served by five Regional Transportation District light rail stations and supports a significant daytime population tied to employment centers, healthcare facilities, and regional destinations. These dynamics introduce evacuation challenges that extend beyond resident movement and require coordination across jurisdictions and transportation systems.
Lone Tree is also home to major regional assets, including Park Meadows, one of Colorado’s largest retail centers, and Sky Ridge Medical Center, a Level II trauma hospital. These facilities add further complexity, including medically vulnerable populations, continuity of healthcare services, and high-density commercial activity.
Together, Lone Tree’s transportation role, transient population, and concentration of critical facilities mean that any large-scale evacuation would need to be regionally coordinated, rapidly scalable, and executable under time pressure—conditions that directly shaped the City’s evacuation planning effort.
Project Outcomes
The CP Journal delivered a city-wide Evacuation Plan designed for execution, rather than a single linear document.
Key outcomes included:
A modular, “tear-and-share” plan, organized by functional area—including law enforcement, EOC operations, and public communications—allowing teams to quickly access the sections relevant to their responsibilities.
More than 40 pages of operational checklists, job aids, and coordination tools, designed to support training, exercises, and just-in-time use during an actual evacuation.
Clear articulation of evacuation strategy, tactics, and decision roles, aligning leadership intent with operational coordination and field execution.
A foundation for sustained capability, enabling the City to move beyond plan completion toward training, validation, and long-term readiness.
According to Arielle Cronin, Lone Tree’s Emergency Manager:
“This evacuation plan is exactly what we were looking for. It captures an evacuation strategy that makes sense for Lone Tree and clearly defines the roles and responsibilities across the many partners involved.
But what we really value is how usable it is. Nearly two-thirds of the plan is dedicated to checklists, job aids, and tools that allow staff to immediately step into their role during an incident. Because it’s organized by functional area, people can quickly grab what they need and get to work.”
That usability extended directly to field operations. As Joe Deland, a commander with the Lone Tree Police Department, noted:
“What works for us is that the plan is organized in a way that’s usable in the field. We can pull the law enforcement section, train to it, and ensure officers understand their role during an evacuation. The plan sets the standard, but training is what will ensure we can carry it out.”
Why It Matters
Large-scale evacuations are among the most complex life-safety operations a local government can face. They require rapid decision-making, cross-jurisdictional coordination, and disciplined execution under extreme uncertainty and time pressure.
The Lone Tree Evacuation Planning project demonstrates that effective evacuation planning is less about volume and more about building a framework that reflects how an organization will actually operate. By grounding the plan in leadership decision-making and organizing it around functional areas, the City now has a structure that can be trained, exercised, and adapted as conditions evolve.
While tailored to Lone Tree’s specific context, the planning approach and plan structure are readily adaptable to other communities facing complex, multi-jurisdictional evacuation challenges—illustrating how planning can serve as a capability-building effort, not just a compliance requirement.
Build Capability Before It’s Needed
The Lone Tree project focused on building clarity, coordination, and readiness before an evacuation was required.
If your organization is working to strengthen life-safety, continuity, or operational readiness capabilities, we’d welcome a conversation.
Email us at: training@cp-journal.com
Looking for more case studies? Start Here.