A CITY CANNOT EVACUATE OVERNIGHT

There’s no such thing as an evacuation plan

Last week, a new version of an old joke was making the rounds: “Q. What is George W. Bush’s position on Roe vs. Wade?  A. He really doesn’t care how people get out of New Orleans.”

Now we’re hearing in the media and elsewhere that an “evacuation plan” is needed.

Is anyone using the words “evacuation plan” really thinking about them?

In all the legitimate fault-finding about Katrina, criticisms of Mayor Nagin and others for failing to evacuate New Orleans are ill founded. There is no way to evacuate a big city overnight. Unless you’re talking about beaming up a few million people as in early Star Trek, there is no such thing as an emergency “evacuation plan.”

Let’s leave out the fact that, until a day before the storm hit, nobody knew exactly where it would hit. Leave out the fact that individuals trapped in the city did not know, once the storm swung eastward, that the levees were going to break. Bending over backward, let’s even leave out the fact that state and local governments have been starved and overloaded by the Bush team for years.

The fact remains that even a few days’ definite foreknowledge, of the sort never available, would still not suffice to evacuate every person in a metropolitan area of a million or more. To get everyone out of a big city, any big city, would require using literally every form of transportation – not just the family car, but every subway, bus, train, plane and boat. Such use of all transportation would require interrupting regular activity and commerce, at least three or four days ahead of time. And that effort, unprecedented in this country, would require the effective commandeering of all transportation by some centralized authority.

Okay, let’s try it. Let’s say you’re the president, or the governor, or the mayor. It’s three or more days before a major storm is predicted to make landfall, with all the usual meteorological caveats about how any deviation may change the course of the storm. In spite of all the caveats, you decide to evacuate every living person from a big city.

How? Well, you would have to start by ignoring all voices of opposition from everyone who stands to lose business for several days, with losses totaling billions. You would have to ignore all the laments from thousands of people worried about their property with the owner absent, and from hundreds worried about caring for the frail or ill.

First, you would have to get the word out, believably, to everyone in every condition, including those without communications equipment.

You would then have to figure out modes of transportation. If you recommend that everyone with a car or other vehicle get in it and leave – well, so much for the roads and highways out of town. So presumably even citizens provided with their own vehicles would have to be placed under some sort of staggered evacuation order – one sector waiting, while another clears out first, etc. That’s armored-guards time.

Let’s say you really want to speed things up, meaning that you must make use of mass transit. Will the railroad companies actually place all their passenger trains at your instant disposal, and hold all railroads vacant so that the loaded passenger trains can leave the city?

Buses would be a reasonable conveyance – assuming that you could commandeer all buses without regard to usual activity, and could get the largest possible number of citizens onto buses. People with cars would be advised to take their own vehicles – so, with the roads clogged, how do you get the buses out? Do you order all smaller vehicles to wait until the loaded buses have left? That’s martial law.

Similar questions abound with regard to planes and jets. Do you commandeer all airborne vehicles locally or nationally, load them up with (for example) the sick and the disabled, commandeer the airports they will need to land in, and override existing air traffic routes to do so?

Questions like these could develop almost infinitely; use your own imagination. But even this scenario is made artificially easy by the fictional hypothesis of several days’ warning, as in a hurricane with an unusually steady course. In an actual emergency (from “emerging” or “emergent”), there would be little or no advance warning. In a chemical explosion, spewing toxins into the air, water and ground for miles around, there would be none.