When the Three Mile Island nuclear generating station along the Susquehanna River seemed on the verge of a full meltdown in March 1979, Gov. Richard L. Thornburgh of Pennsylvania asked a trusted aide to make sure that the evacuation plans for the surrounding counties would work.
The aide came back ashen faced. Dauphin County, on the eastern shore of the river, planned to send its populace west to safety over the Harvey Taylor Bridge.
“All well and good,” Mr. Thornburgh said in a recent speech, “except for the fact that Cumberland County on the west shore of the river had adopted an evacuation plan that would funnel all exiting traffic eastbound over — you guessed it — the same Harvey Taylor Bridge.”
Nearly 250,000 people would have been sent in opposite directions over the same narrow bridge.
Mr. Thornburgh quickly corrected the plans, but more problems would soon arise — just as they have in many other disasters. As the Japanese are learning, the science behind herding thousands, sometimes millions, of people from danger to safety is uncertain at best. And the lessons learned from one disaster can both hurt and help with the next.
For instance, not enough people left New Orleans and the surrounding areas before Hurricane Katrina struck on August 29, 2005, and more than 1,800 people died. At least part of the cause may have been that Mayor Ray Nagin of New Orleans waited until the day before the storm hit to order a mandatory evacuation.
The lesson of Katrina? Get everybody out, and get them out early.
Three weeks later, a second major storm, Hurricane Rita, came barreling toward the Gulf Coast. Mayor Bill White of Houston, intent on avoiding the mistakes that plagued New Orleans, told everybody in the city to get out, and get out now. “The time for waiting is over,” he said.
Oops. Within hours, the interstates around Houston were at a standstill. When mandatory evacuations were later ordered for areas most at risk, those residents could not get out of harm’s way because the interstates were already packed with people from low-risk areas. Some spent days in their cars.
The state police set about turning inbound lanes into outbound ones, but that took hours. More people died or suffered health problems from the bungled evacuation than from the storm itself.
The lesson of Rita? Limit evacuations only to those most at risk, and have plans in place well in advance to reverse traffic flow patterns on major arteries.
Every one of the nation’s 104 nuclear power plants is required to have detailed evacuation and incident plans in place before operating. The plans are reviewed by federal, state and local authorities. But problems crop up and almost certainly keep being created.
Brian Wolshon, the director of the Gulf Coast Center for Evacuation and Transportation Resiliency, said that he was analyzing one county’s emergency plans that seemed to have every detail covered.
“It was a wonderful report, with plans to move senior citizens out of care facilities and even out of hospitals, and they had signed contracts with bus and ambulance providers,” said Dr. Wolshon, who is also a professor at Louisiana State University. “But that same low-cost provider had the same contract with the county next door, and they had the capacity to evacuate only one of these counties.”
Indeed, emergency authorities have only in recent years begun to realize that evacuations are often regional and even multistate events. Evacuating almost any city in the United States requires significant preparation and resources in surrounding cities. And some events are simply too resource-intensive or too complicated to plan for.
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