  We prove an explicit, quantitative criterion that ensures the Heegaard
surfaces in Dehn fillings behave "as expected." Given a cusped hyperbolic
manifold X, and a Dehn filling whose meridian and longitude curves are longer
than 2pi(2g-1), we show that every genus g Heegaard splitting of the filled
manifold is isotopic to a splitting of the original manifold X. The analogous
statement holds for fillings of multiple boundary tori. This gives an effective
version of a theorem of Moriah-Rubinstein and Rieck-Sedgwick.
