Evacuation plans? Awesome!
When I was an Army conscript back in the Old Country I was assigned to a unit that did peacetime planning for wartime mobilization and movement of troops (we used to jokingly call ourselves Logistics Rangers). That stuff was right up my alley (actually, what really would have been up my alley would have been manning a machinegun on a gunship, but still).
Anyway, reading Boston’s emergency evacuation plan reminded me of those heady days of military planning fun. Now, the army I served in was a total Mickey Mouse operation compared to, say, the United States Army, and any state or municipality in America has ready access to some of the best soldiers in the world, so I’m not going to sit here and belittle or otherwise poke fun of Boston’s emergency evacuation plan. However, I do hope the plan contains all the nitty-gritty metrics you need to be aware of when it’s time to move a huge mass of ass.
For example, will there be enough gas at the gas stations along the evacuation routes? How many tow-trucks will be needed to remove broken-down vehicles so that the evacuation can proceed as smoothly as possible (it will probably be chaotic at best, especially if some of the evacuation routes can’t be used for whatever reason). Are there fire or other hazards near the evacuation routes?
The crappy thing about emergencies is that when you plan for them you assume that certain resources will be available if the emergency actually happens, but then you’ll find out that in fact they aren’t there because
a) they never were there and you had faulty data
b) they used to be there but deprecated and you weren’t informed about it
c) they should have been there but the personnel that’s supposed to use them have gone splitsville
d) somebody else also planned on using them and he has priority.
The large-scale evacuations we’ve seen along the Mexican Gulf suggests that they are doable even today, but it should be kept in mind that those evacuations always happen well in advance of the arrival of the actual emergency. If Boston is suddenly ordered to be evacuated after terrorists incinerate a U.S. city, then we’ll be looking at a whole different panic level.
One should be realistic about the prospects for any evacuation plan, but, as that old commandment says, Proper Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance. A 70% execution of a 50% plan is a whole lot better than a 100% execution of a 0% plan.
If nothing else, planning is fun!
