Evacutations: How would you do it?

[Weird Harold]

There has been a lot of talk on the various news outlets about reviewing evacuation plans for all major population centers.

If you had carte blanche to arrange the evacuation of a major city how would you avoid the problems Houston had last week?

What about New Orleans or your home town.

Just for starters:

My home town (where I was raised, not where I live now) has only one highway leading north and south and two forest service roads (essentially one-and-a-half lanes) leading off into the forest. They eventuallyled to other similar roads that lead to civilization, but are usually impassible in winter.

The problem of getting 3,500 people out in an orderly manner is one of staging the evacuation so the two lane highwy doesn't become a parking lot. The simplest way to arrange that is to Evacuate one neighborhood at a time.

Since the total numbers are relatively small, Divide the town into six to ten regions and schedule each region to leave at one hour intervals. Start with two or three regions and add one every hour or two to regulate the traffic flow.

There are enough school busses and the town is small enough that those without transportation of their own can walk to the high-school for a bus ride if necessary.

Since it is a small town, the elderly and infirm are known to almost everyone and neighbors look out for them -- a double check by the police/firemen to insure that they have a rideout of town is likely all that would be required. There are no hospitals or nursing homes to worry about.

The main problem is the lack of alternate routes if the main highway is blocked or flooded -- the forest roads are likely to be blocked as well by anything that could block the main highway in both directions.

 

[cantdog]

The mechanical end of it, devising a plan like the one you describe, for example, with permutations to cover Road X blocked, Road Y blocked, and so forth-- that's the easy part. You can't leave the Plan in the planning room, or just file it away, so you will want to educate a short list of folks in its intricacies. That would be firemen, constables, fire warden, principal, selectmen or councillors or whoever. And do that again periodically. And explain what you have to the county or the state disaster people.

Fine.

But the real difficulty comes when you are on the ground trying to implement any part of this. I've done that, as a fireman. Cops have almost zero training in how to do this, but they have some tools for it. Bullhorns, for instance. Us fire people had no bullhorns, we had to knock on doors. If you've ever gone door-to-door with any sort of agenda, you know what a pitiable proportion of the available dwellings interact with you. "Go house to house, clear them out." That's your order. Yuh, just try it.

Every last person wants the whole situation explained to them, even when you once get their attention, too. There's a chlorine leak, to stay in the area is to risk death, please don't argue, just go, you say. But they won't accept that. And a chlorine leak is pretty cut and dried, man. What if it's a bit more borderline? We are getting more rain tonight, we think maybe possibly it might just flood, for instance. There's a lot more room to debate the wisdom of evacuation in a case like that. The interviews get longer, and there's no time.

An hour per neighborhood? How prompt are most people you know? What about the hour and a half it'll take to go door-to-door with your evacuation news? Has any of these people ever given one thought to how much they might need to bring along? If they're becoming nomads, abandoning their homes for weeks, they really should pack something.

Sure, you'll get the word out on the TV and the radio. There's still no doubt someone will have to send a team through door-to-door.

Herding cats is easier.

 

[Alex756]

My "town" is impossible to evacuate in an orderly manner.

Too many politicians and enviromental groups have delayed too many bridges and light rail facilities too much.

It just can't happen in an orderly manner. Even turning the 3 interstate ways out of city counterflow and we'll look worst then houston. Heck I've seen days with a single accident on a main road that you could have substituted out 'normal' days for the pics of houston's evac

~Alex

 

[minsue]

Any large metropolitan area is going to be impossible to evacuate. There are some obvious changes to be made in going about the evacuation - like making all freeways and major roads out of the city one way as soon as the evacuation order is given. (If you have mandatory evacuations, you don't want people coming in the city any way, right? ) But beyond that, a heartbreakingly large number of people are just screwed.

 

[cantdog]

And each atom in the stream of evacuation has a separate goal. What the people in charge want to do is send all the traffic along HERE to THERE, all the ones over HERE to THAT PLACE. And they have good reasons to think that's how the stream should flow.

But no. Sophia Jane, for instance, was going to her mother's place. She would balk at being sent to Mobridge. And every other one of those cars will be the same.

 

[TxRad]

When the evacuation of Houston began I was in Cuero, a small town northwest of Victoria Tx. Victoria is 150 miles west of Houston. Using the back roads i made it home, 60 miles north of Houston in 5 hours. About the same time it takes to make the trip on the major highways.

Major point to remember, freeways aren't the only way out of town and there are fewer cars on the back roads and more gas. Gas was the major problem with the evacuation. Both for the people leaving and for the people whose area the evacuees were going through. Fuel up before you leave and pack supplies. Plan as though you are going camping because you may end up doing just that.

I will say that I've never seen Houston drivers so calm and courteous.

 

[TxRad]

Posted twice OOOOOPs

 

[cantdog]

I heard stories of folks blocking back roads and redirecting people. Detours.

They'd likely do that in Maine. There is only the one interstate highway, 95. Most traffic is secondary roads, in the normal course of things. Any managers of evacuations would have a presence on them. Notice the blithe assumptions above that no one would reasonably want to go IN to town during these times. Packing your stuff, collecting your family-- there's plenty of reasons to do that.

 

[elsol]

I would yell..

'THE SKY IS FALLING!!! RUN LIKE HELL!!!"

The smart ones would find a way out, the rest... well, intelligent design says God will save them if he's not distracted by something less important like creating a new galaxy or making sure the fishies mate..

Sincerely,
ElSol

 

[mismused]

delete

 

[elsol]

Have you met New Yorkers?

MUHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!

Any evacuation in NY is bound to have problems.

In the middle of a natural disaster you want me to WHAT!!! Walk to Jersey through the Lincoln Tunnel... Motherfucker, I'm going this way!

Sincerely,
ElSol

 

[Colleen Thomas]

The problem, as I see it, was that evacuation planning was geared to people who could get out. An assumption of mobility was made, that should not have been given census stats for New orleans and other major metro areas.

The first thing I would do is designate evacuation points. Places within the city where people without transport could congregate. Next their should be a plan in effect to commandeer all busses, cabs, planes, trains and ships in the city at the time. Planes should depart only with full loads, even those that normally carry cargo. Ships should have at least as many passengers as can be comfortably afforded berths. Trains should be filled to standing room only before being allowed to depart. Busses including school buses should be utilized to get masses of people out of town, while cabs should be dispatched to pick up people without transport and ferry them to the collection points. A toll free number should be set up, with emergency staffing plans, prefearbly in a remote location, to take calls from those unable to leave and communicate their addresses to the cabs.

Military units should be activated with the evacuation order, in a prearanged liason with the state government. Med evac choppers and macv flights could be used to move nursing home and hospital patients. The national guard should be stationed at the collection points to ensure safety and a calm and orderly movement ofpeople from the points to the busses.

If Katrina and Rita proved anything, they proved people will help out. A simple 1800 number where people could volunteer to carry someone with them as they left would probably provide a good number of rides.

A fund should be set aside to compensate the airlines, trainlines, ships, and cab companies. Money isn't everything, but fair compensation would go a long way towards ensureing compliance.

On the assumption that I am not going to get everyone out, food, fuel, medical supplies and generators should be stocked in diverse locations. these depots would go over to the guard at the time of their call up, giving them the means to render aide to those who must stay, without long aits to accumulate and ferry supplies.

 

[Weird Harold]

The mechanical end of it, devising a plan like the one you describe, for example, with permutations to cover Road X blocked, Road Y blocked, and so forth-- that's the easy part. You can't leave the Plan in the planning room, or just file it away, so you will want to educate a short list of folks in its intricacies.
...
An hour per neighborhood? How prompt are most people you know? What about the hour and a half it'll take to go door-to-door with your evacuation news? Has any of these people ever given one thought to how much they might need to bring along? If they're becoming nomads, abandoning their homes for weeks, they really should pack something.

Good points.

I chose to start with small town example because the difficulties you describe are fairly easy to overcome in that environment -- neighbors talk to each other in small towns so it's fairly easy to spread the word.

I wasn't very clear on the "add a neighborhood every hour or so" part of the plan though. The first two or three regions would have more than an hour to get moving and the later regions would have a similar lead time while the first regions evacuated ahead of them. The one hour separation is for the whole notification and mobilization process -- i.e. notify the first regions first with a specific deadline that gives them a reasonable amount of time to get their act together, then start on the next region with a deadline that is an hour later, etc.

The reason for starting more than one region moving at the beginning and only adding single regions later is because there will be stragglers who don't make the deadline for their region and will mingle with the later regions.

In larger cities with multiple zip codes, the zip codes can be used to designate "regions."

The time required to get the word out by going door-to-door has to be factored into the timing intervals -- an hour is enough for a small town, a larger population center obviously couldn't use intervals that close without a lot of practice on the part of both authorities and citizens.

 

[Weird Harold]

My "town" is impossible to evacuate in an orderly manner.

I think it was in Eisenhower's memiors that it was revealed that the real Civil Defense evacuation plans for large cities was basically, "don't tell anyone because there is no way a large population center can be evacuated in just a few hours."

Of course, those Civil Defense evacution plans were based on the premise of thirty minutes or so notification that nuclear missiles were on the way rather than the three or four days notification available today for Hurricanes.

From what I've seen from various sources, 72 hours is pretty much the minimum time required for evacuating a large population center and even that time frame requires perfect cooperation and coordination.

The biggest problem is exactly what you describe -- only three interstates/major highways out of town. Actually, most major population centers have four high-capacity highways but very few have more than that. Many areas have lesser routes out of town, but planners tnd to ignor them for the major (interstate) routes.

 

[Weird Harold]

The problem, as I see it, was that evacuation planning was geared to people who could get out. An assumption of mobility was made, that should not have been given census stats for New orleans and other major metro areas.

The first thing I would do is designate evacuation points. ... Next their should be a plan in effect to commandeer all busses, cabs, planes, trains and ships in the city at the time. Planes should depart only with full loads, even those that normally carry cargo. Ships should have at least as many passengers as can be comfortably afforded berths. Trains should be filled to standing room only before being allowed to depart. ...

Military units should be activated with the evacuation order, in a prearanged liason with the state government. Med evac choppers and macv flights could be used to move nursing home and hospital patients. ...

Most of Houston's evacuation problems seem to be related to the traffic jam. Not only did those who had independent means of transport get caught up in the delays, the buses and other transport for those without independent transportation were immobilized as well.

Texas did a much better job of using med-evac airlift to evacuate hospitals -- both civilian and military airlift assets -- than New Orleans, but I think that is one area where the military could be used earlier and more effectively. I didn't see any mention of the heavier aircraft -- C-141, C-17, C-5 etc -- being used for evacuations, just C-130's.

However, I think that solving the traffic jam problem for those who are mobile would free up a lot of personnel for managing the other aspects of the evacuation better.

One idea that has occured to me that might reduce the congestion is to control the flow by license plte numbers -- the way that even/odd fuel days were used in the seventies for fuel rationing.

If they designated certain time windows and/or certain routes by the last digit (or last two digits) of the license plate number it would at least simplify the task of determining who is supposed to be on the road at any given time.

I haven't explored the ramifications of that idea completely -- like what to do about people who either can't or won't make the required time window or need to take a route other than the one designated for their plate number.

But, using the license plate number would at least divide the exodus into ten or one-hundred easily identifiable segments instead of having to stop and check addresses to determine who is supposed to be on which road at what time.

 

[TxRad]

A couple of things to add from the point of being close by...

One... The mandatory evacuation of Houston was only for the people who flooded in the last Hurricane... those in the floodplain areas of Town....

Two... It was set up to go in three zones...

Three... it didn't go as planned...

Four......The news blew things up and scared the hell out of people causing a near panic....

Five..... Mosty people didn't plan ahead or even take the time to stop and think...

six..... The evacuation cover an area from the La. line to Victoria Tx... 250 miles across... going west out opf Houston you have I10 and Hwy 59.... both were as bad if not worse than I45 and Hwy 59 north...

seven.....2.5 million people left town where only 1 million were supposed to....

 

[minsue]

Notice the blithe assumptions above that no one would reasonably want to go IN to town during these times. Packing your stuff, collecting your family-- there's plenty of reasons to do that.

Oh, I know people would want to go in to town, Cant. However, if t'were all up to me, they wouldn't be using the interstate and major arteries to do so. You want to come in when a mandatory evacuation is issued, you're coming in the backroads. There are too many who need to get out while you're trying to get in and you're gonna need to be able to get out as well. As I'd stated in my original post, I'm only talking about large metropolitan areas (because I wouldn't dream to think I had any idea about small towns, having only visited them or driven through 'em). There's more than a few ways in to those.

 

[sweetnpetite]

An hour per neighborhood? How prompt are most people you know? What about the hour and a half it'll take to go door-to-door with your evacuation news? Has any of these people ever given one thought to how much they might need to bring along? If they're becoming nomads, abandoning their homes for weeks, they really should pack something.

What if your 'neighborhood' is an apartment complex with a zillion buildings, each housing about 100 people? That's a lot of doors to knock on, and a lot of buses if that becomes necessary.

 

[cheerful_deviant]

Any evacuation of a major metro area is never going to go well or be entirely successful.

1. Even the most well laid plan could go to hell at the slightest provocation. For most major metro areas ther are generally somewhere between 3 to 6 major highways leading out. Most people would assume these are the best route out of town and head for then, wittness what happend in Huston. The highways back up onto the arterial roads now clogging them. Major interchanges are usually in busy areas with major secondary roads so now they stop. Gridlock. Most highways that are now in service were not designed to handle the number of cars that are on them on a daily basis. Never mind trying to dump the entire population of the city on them in a short time span. Throw in one car fire on one of those highways and even a will running evac will quickly go to hell.

2. People are stupid, generally speaking. The intelligence of a group of people can be calcuated by taking the IQ of the dumbest person and dividing it by the number of people. People will du stupid things that they would not do under normal circumstances. THey will leave without making sure there is gas in their car. THey will get stuck in traffic and decide to abandon their car where it is stopped and strike out on foot in hopes of outwalking the comming appocolypse. Suonds stupid but it happned. Now you have an abandoned car in the middle of the highway. THe athoroties can't deal with it, to much else going on. So there it sits.

3. Poeple will panic or not care. The two extreems. Some people will run out the door screaming and head for the hills without waiting for instruction, their turn, whatever. THe other extreem is the people who wait till the absolute last minute, then try to get out, or decide not to leave at all. Both cause their own kinds of problems and confuse the situation further.

 

[Weird Harold]

What if your 'neighborhood' is an apartment complex with a zillion buildings, each housing about 100 people? That's a lot of doors to knock on, and a lot of buses if that becomes necessary.

Apartment complexes and gated communities are microcosms of the evacuation problem because once you do notify everyone (which I would task the complex owners with accomplishing, BTW) there is a "choke-point" at the single access point from the complex to the city streets.

I live in a gated apartment complex and there have been times when getting outof the complex and onto the city street has taken as long as ten minutes because of some special event clogging the main street with traffic -- and that's just to get across the street into the empty lanes going in the opposite direction.

When you scale up that kind of problem to an entire metropolitian area, I think it's fairly easy to see why freeways can turn into parking lots.

PS: I think modern evacuation planning suffers from the lack of Neighborhood Civil Defense Wardens. Perhaps that is an idea athat needs to be revived, or disaster planners could incorporate Neighborhood Watch orgnizations where they exist.

 

[cantdog]

What if your 'neighborhood' is an apartment complex with a zillion buildings, each housing about 100 people? That's a lot of doors to knock on, and a lot of buses if that becomes necessary.

Oh, it certainly is. Larger pop centers have larger budgets and larger cop forces and larger stocks of equipment, but it's in the nature of things, just the same, that it can't be enough.

If a city government set about building up the masses of trained people and amassing the stocks of equipment, communications, transport and all that jive, and then more stuff just to use up during the training your people, and then more stuff to house and maintain all the other stuff... and if they got together what they would need to have a reasonable chance of doing this, it would be a complete boondoggle. A monumental waste of tax money. Nobody can afford to keep all that shit around. Nobody can afford especially to keep all that manpower around.

Except the retardedly overfunded federal armed services. We have the troops to promote our dreams of global dominance, remember: enormous numbers of trained people and ridiculous amounts of equipment. Any hope of being able to staff those highways and fan out through the city to prod and direct people, to extricate the aged and sick, herd the prisoners in the jails, transport hundreds of thousands, rests with the armed services being available and being given training for the work.

 

[Xelebes]

Edmonton = 1 million people

highway to the northwest (Highway 2) - 3 lanes
highway to the west (Yellowhead highway - 3 lanes)
highway to the east (Yellowhead highway - 3 lanes)
highway to the northeast (Highway 40 - 1 lane, soon being expanded to 2 or 3 lanes)
highway to the southeast (Highway 14 - 1 lane)
highway to the south (Highway 2 - 4 lanes before splitting with Highway 2A, each getting 2 lanes.)

I am sure there is many other small highways not including range roads.

I remember there was once air-raid sirens along the Whitemud and Yellowhead Freeways back in 1995 or so but they have been taken down between 1995 and 1998.

However, I doubt that an evacuation would be necessary for this city because any floods have never gone above the 2nd set of banks to flood more than 90% of the city. However, we do get tornadoes and dust storms, however those would rarely call for an evacuation.

 

[cantdog]

Any evacuation of a major metro area is never going to go well or be entirely successful.

1. Even the most well laid plan could go to hell at the slightest provocation. For most major metro areas ther are generally somewhere between 3 to 6 major highways leading out. Most people would assume these are the best route out of town and head for then, wittness what happend in Huston. The highways back up onto the arterial roads now clogging them. Major interchanges are usually in busy areas with major secondary roads so now they stop. Gridlock. Most highways that are now in service were not designed to handle the number of cars that are on them on a daily basis. Never mind trying to dump the entire population of the city on them in a short time span. Throw in one car fire on one of those highways and even a will running evac will quickly go to hell.

2. People are stupid, generally speaking. The intelligence of a group of people can be calcuated by taking the IQ of the dumbest person and dividing it by the number of people. People will du stupid things that they would not do under normal circumstances. THey will leave without making sure there is gas in their car. THey will get stuck in traffic and decide to abandon their car where it is stopped and strike out on foot in hopes of outwalking the comming appocolypse. Suonds stupid but it happned. Now you have an abandoned car in the middle of the highway. THe athoroties can't deal with it, to much else going on. So there it sits.

3. Poeple will panic or not care. The two extreems. Some people will run out the door screaming and head for the hills without waiting for instruction, their turn, whatever. THe other extreem is the people who wait till the absolute last minute, then try to get out, or decide not to leave at all. Both cause their own kinds of problems and confuse the situation further.

Yep. You can send in Guard infantry and SWAT people to herd them out, but you can't do all the thinking for everyone.

It really is always going to fuck up. What the brouhaha has been about is the design failures. FEMA was not always there. They were CD in my youth, Civil Defense, concerned with nuclear war scenarios, setting up shelters with crackers in 'em and training firemen in the operation of dosimeters and geiger counters.

The growing arsenals of nukes worldwide, the overkill factor, made their mission seem stupid and futile, and then the end of the Cold War made it obsolete, but along the way they reinvented themselves as FEMA. They still taught us about Geiger counters, but in a scenario involving spilled nuclear material or failed containment on power facilities. Their mission became disaster preparedness in the general sense.

It was the thinking of FEMA people that structured today's disaster planning. The real resources, the big bunches of helicopters, trucks, and people, are in the federal level, as i just explained. There's lesser amounts of stuff at the state level, and nearly all the states have disaster planning departments, state-level FEMAs.

Ours in Maine is MEMA, and the one in New Hampshire is NHEMA. Major cities like Houston and New Orleans are obviously going to need federal levels of men and equipment. Small towns can make do with state level stuff. But the knowhow has to be local level.

Only the locals know where everything is. Only the locals know where the problems are, where the old folks' homes and the extended care facilities are, where the jails and prisons are. The thinking has been that the Guard, for example, and the MEMA people, place themselves at the direction of the local authorities. They present themselves as resources to them. If it's a federal thing, the Coast Guard and National Guard and FEMA resources are placed in the direction of the state folks, because they may have the stuff but they do not know the ground. Some of the mechanisms FEMA came up with are surprising. Firemen, specifically ambulance personnel, actually have disaster kits. These are bright blue hardhats and special brightly colored markers. When the unit of federal resources arrives, they look for the guy with the bright helmet. He's the local dude in charge of the scene.

There's a lot to it. The design failures I'm talking about are several.

1. Many Guard units are unavailable, being deployed in the empire's wars overseas. Even when they come back, they tend to leave the really useful stuff, helicopters, bulldozers, transport, over there in the war zones. Bush promised 40,000 Guard when he showed up the first time and did a photo op out the window of Air Force One. Day Ten: 35,000 total in all the affected states, with less equipment than usual. By "usual" i intend "what was ordinarily in the hands of the Guard before the War on Terror stripped the cupboard bare."

2. FEMA itself was decommissioned. It was absorbed into anti-terror department control. This left all the MEMAs and NHEMAs stranded and gutted their planning scenarios by changing the rules. Planners had to deal now not with FEMA but with an office which was trying to resolve CIA and NSA and FBI turf wars and develop a co-ordinated intelligence and ops command, and which had no time for flood planning and tank farm explosion planning.

3. FEMA was being considered for 'privatization,' and so was very low priority. Believe it or not, like the prisonindustrial system and the welfare safety net and so much else, the Bushies wanted to bid out the functions of the office to private corporations. Therefore the leader appointed for the agency was essentially there to supervise the dismantling of the department, not make it vital and healthy and useful.

4. Local control had been supplanted as a concept to make the anti-terror outfit more autocratic and powerful. There was, theoretically, now a lot more federal control of this sort of thing. FEMA hijacked ambulances on the ground in N. O. which had patients in the back. One famous cae: the man's Alzheimer's-afflicted mother was placed in an ambulance to be taken to a particular facility, when FEMA took the rig over and he now has no clue what they did with his Mom. Nnacy Grace was all over this one a few days ago. Mark that. A few DAYS ago, weeks after the Katrina storm.

and so on and so on.


Carte blanche is nice, Weird, but steps were taken which handicapped everything. It has been a long time since the Anti Terror Homeland Fatherland Security Windowpeeper Department was formed. Years, dude. They had done the destruction of the old system, and erected nothing in its place.

 

[cantdog]

In fact, Weird, the whole exercise you suggest here, asking a bunch of pornographers to think up, de novo, how to plan for the jute mill exploding or the dam busting or Three Mile Island turning into a big green glowing gopher, burning its way into the bedrock and emitting a cloud of deadly gases, is not very productive.

You want to have us all come to the conclusion that, gee, this is hard, gee, this is impossible. Whereas, there has already been reams of plans and decades of skull sweat devoted to these problems.

Such systems as we had were gutted from Washington and subsumed into a confusing homeland Security Windowpeeper Political Police system. The last three years, when Louisiana and New Orleans were begging for funding to fix the levees (using plans already developed by the Corps and the State planners a decade before, and only needing money to work), they had to try to justify the funding in terms of its usefulness as an anti-terror measure.

That's the problem. Everyone already knows big evacuations are a cluster fuck. But all the resources there are do no good if there's nobody clearly responsible to use them. That sort of plan, the who-runs-the-scene, where-do-my-trucks-report-to kind of plan, is exactly the plans that no longer were applicable once FEMA was removed from its linchpin role in favor of Tom Ridge.

I suspect you, here.

 

[Weird Harold]

In fact, Weird, the whole exercise you suggest here, asking a bunch of pornographers to think up, de novo, how to plan for the jute mill exploding or the dam busting or Three Mile Island turning into a big green glowing gopher, burning its way into the bedrock and emitting a cloud of deadly gases, is not very productive.

You want to have us all come to the conclusion that, gee, this is hard, gee, this is impossible. Whereas, there has already been reams of plans and decades of skull sweat devoted to these problems.

I part, I do want people to realize the scale of the problem, but mostly I just want people to THINK about the issue.

The issues you raise about the changes to disaster management organization are part of what I want people to think about -- mostly from the standpoint of what they should be writing their elected representatives about so that evacuations aren't such cluster-fucks; or at least no more fucked up than they have to be.