City Evacuation / Disaster Plans

[hkskyline]

During times of crisis, such as natural disasters, what plans do your cities have in place for an orderly evacuation or handling of a crisis situation?

For example, London emergency officials have conducted drills across departments designed to respond to terrorist attacks.

[desirous]

Nearby Houston had a three-day-long traffic jam when it tried to flee Hurricane Rita. I daren't imagine Austin doing the same; roadway capacity here is much worse.

[MexAmericanMoose]

^ except there isn't as much people....but yeah, that evacuation sucked ass

[Overground]

I couldn't find anything on evacuation.

Vancouver has Disaster Response Routes - (taken from gov't site)

-Emergency planners and transportation engineers from all levels of government have cooperated to identify a network of roads that can best move emergency services and supplies to where they are needed in the event of a major disaster. Public awareness and cooperation is necessary to keep these Disaster Response Routes clear following an earthquake or other disaster, in the interest of saving lives and protecting property.

-Fire, police, ambulance and other emergency services and supplies must move quickly to where the greatest need is... and mobility is the key. Road access from one area to another, from airports and ports, must be kept clear of non-essential vehicles and debris.

-Greater Vancouver is the first place in the world to plan ahead for disaster transportation routes by posting the signs ahead of time.

-Many people believe these signs identify an evacuation route where people would go to leave an area. Not true. Disaster Response Routes are for emergency personnel, so that they may reach you in a disaster.




There is other components for Vancouver handling disaster situations like the control centre called E-Comm. Perhaps someone else would like to post something on that.

[desirous]

Originally Posted by MexAmericanMoose

^ except there isn't as much people....but yeah, that evacuation sucked ass

We have one six-lane freeway that leads out of town, plus a few farm roads. :P

The only friends that made good time out of Houston headed east on I-10 all the way to Atlanta: nobody went that way, so there was no congestion.

[Skybean]

Toronto's plan: Run for your life / every man, woman and child for themselves.

[desirous]

Originally Posted by Skybean

Toronto's plan: Run for your life / every man, woman and child for themselves.

Run? If America gets so annihilated that the baddies start hitting Canada, there's nowhere to run to.

[invincible]

Draw a line from Brisbane to Perth and abandon everything north of that line.

That was one of the plans if Japan started to invade Australia in WWII.

[I-275westcoastfl]

Ive seen it on the news for a hurricane plan its pretty good. I must remind people Florida is the most prepared state when it comes to disasters.

[Xusein]

Here: Go in any direction but south

[djm19]

If people in Los Angeles were to have to evacuate for some reason, were screwed. Lots of cars, and every possible route is already a traffic disaster on a normal day.

[MexAmericanMoose]

Originally Posted by desirous

We have one six-lane freeway that leads out of town, plus a few farm roads. :P

The only friends that made good time out of Houston headed east on I-10 all the way to Atlanta: nobody went that way, so there was no congestion.

because the hurrican was in that direction....but if i would have taken that route i would have hauled ass because i am sure there was nobody on the freeway heading east!!

[FREKI]

Not so much is treathning Copenhagen other than terror and the old Swedish Nuclear plant Barsebäck 10km away ( last reactor is being closed in a year or two )

In case of either theres a plan to use the public transportation system ( which we have more than enough of ) - the rail and bus systems have their own part of the Civil Defense ( like many other important systems and companies have ) that will be able to take over and run it, if it get's extreme.

Other than that we have the Royal Guards ( my old regiment ) only 20km north of the city ready with plenty of APCs and other terrain vehicles also ready to help people evac - so we are covered plenty and then some

[AndySocks]

All I have to say is Long Island, all four counties (Kings, Queens, Nassau, Suffolk) would be fucked, if for whatever reason the whole area had to be evacuated. A population of over seven million... and three bridges directly to the mainland, four more plus two tunnels via Manhattan and Staten Island...

Learn to swim, muthafukkas.

[miamicanes]

What's supposed to happen:

People who live at the beach evacuate.

What really happens:

People who live in Miami Beach buy party supplies, while people who live on the mainland run for their lives and try to flee the state anytime a hurricane comes within a hundred miles of Miami. It's the lasting legacy of Hurricane Andrew, where the government stupidly evacuated people from South Beach (40 miles north of Andrew's landfall) to shelters in south and west Dade County (a.k.a., "Ground Zero") -- even after it realized beyond any shadow of doubt that Andrew was going to make landfall to the South. Ultimately, most evacuees ended up in areas that got hit WAY worse than their own neighborhoods. Their rationale for maintaining the lie up to the last minute -- to the point of telling mainland residents in central Dade to go south, too -- was that it was "better" to send the last few people into greater danger than to risk having people who'd already evacuated south hit the roads again and head north. When the details became public knowledge after Andrew, the government lost all credibility.

Actually, evacuations been dropping off now that we've had a few small hurricanes... but during the first few years after Andrew, literally the entire mainland population of Miami tried to flee anything resembling a hurricane (I know, because I was one of 'em). I don't remember the storm's name, but one in particular was in 1995 that ended up being a fairly small storm, but it caused a bigger traffic jam than Andrew did and evoked what can nicely be described as "mass public hysteria" and "blind terror".

[Azn_chi_boi]

From Chicago, if a tornado was heading to Chicago from the west. Head South and then South to Gary and beyond. I'm sure almost everyone else will drive north to Milwaukee and/or Madison.

Well, the safest part of Chicagoland, and least populated is South and east. However there are so many interstates that merge into each other because the lake blocks the northeast from the northwest.

If people from Wisconsin coming down to sell their cheese here, head east toward the lake and swim across the lake

[desirous]

Originally Posted by AndySocks

All I have to say is Long Island, all four counties (Kings, Queens, Nassau, Suffolk) would be fucked, if for whatever reason the whole area had to be evacuated. A population of over seven million... and three bridges directly to the mainland, four more plus two tunnels via Manhattan and Staten Island...

Learn to swim, muthafukkas.

How many people do you think trains can pull out? And subways to the Bronx?

[hkskyline]

New York City not prepared for disaster-experts

NEW YORK, Sept 20 (Reuters) - New York City's health care system is not prepared for a major disaster such as a large-scale attack, hurricane or pandemic, health care and disaster planning experts said.

The city, struck in the Sept. 11 attacks and a world financial center, is vulnerable due to underfunding and a lack of understanding of the possible complexities of a crisis, officials from city hospitals and emergency services said this week at a conference on disaster preparedness.

Disaster preparedness in the United States has been a leading preoccupation of U.S. authorities since the Sept. 11 attacks. That concern was heightened after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans and other parts of the U.S. Gulf Coast in 2005, killing more than 1,400 people and revealing gaping holes in local and federal planning.

"We have no idea what a prepared New York is. What we're doing now is random acts of preparedness that all together don't really amount to an appropriate safety net," said Irwin Redlener, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health.

"We're in a very, very bad place."

The consensus at Tuesday's conference was that New York was more prepared than New Orleans had been before Katrina hit. The experts said many city agencies such as New York's police department, fire department, and Office of Emergency Management are among the best in the country.

Still, they said the city's size -- New York City has a population of more than 8 million -- and urban density and diversity make additional planning necessary.

Brian O'Neill, who heads emergency services for the North Shore - Long Island Jewish Health System, said the city's emergency services have the potential to move large numbers of people injured in a catastrophe, but not necessarily the hospital capacity to deal with them.

"We don't have 20,000 open beds ... for hospitals to absorb that," O'Neill said. "We would have to rely, at that point in time, for long-term solutions from the federal government."

Columbia's Redlener said hospitals would be immediately overwhelmed in such a situation and the number of deaths would balloon.

HURRICANE WORRIES

A hurricane could also cause chaos. Before Katrina, the Red Cross estimated that it would have to evacuate 1 million people and shelter 250,000 if a major hurricane hit New York.

Now it believes it would have to evacuate 3 million New Yorkers, 600,000 of whom would need shelter, according to Scott Graham, Chief Response Officer for the American Red Cross in Greater New York.

The city is better prepared for a natural outbreak of infectious disease because federal institutions now closely track diseases and can quickly isolate them.

Nevertheless, such an outbreak could still fill city hospitals and leave the city's relief agencies strapped.

Bruce Logan, Chief of New York Downtown Hospital's Department of Medicine, said he was unable to get federal funding for an expansion of the hospital's emergency room, despite being four blocks away from Ground Zero where the World Trade Center's twin towers were destroyed on Sept. 11 and the first hospital to respond to the attacks.

"We're in the financial capital of the world ... I see that emergency room as an element of our national defense," Logan said. "Unfortunately, I can't get our government officials -- especially the state and federal ones -- to see it the same way."

[melbguy]

here in Melbourne we don't really have many threats, apart from terrorism or floods.

In terms of floods, run for higher ground and wait for the water to go down

In terms of terrorism, build a big wall around whatever the problem is and contain it (the Australian Federal Police just love putting up giant walls and blockades).

[PedroGabriel]

here we don't have any known threats, no floods, no hurricanes, no heartquakes, no vulcanoes. Hurricanes can do landfall in here (Nothern Portugal, east Atlantic), but it is a really rare event, and when they do landfall they are really weak because the water avarages 18ºc and are nothing but a curiosity and a small storm. In 2200 years of recorded history there were no natural disasters.

So, it is not prepared for something like that.