# City Evacuation / Disaster Plans



## hkskyline (Sep 13, 2002)

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.


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## desirous (Jun 10, 2006)

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.


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## MexAmericanMoose (Nov 19, 2005)

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


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## Overground (Apr 11, 2005)

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.


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## desirous (Jun 10, 2006)

MexAmericanMoose said:


> ^^^ 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. 

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.


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## Skybean (Jun 16, 2004)

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


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## desirous (Jun 10, 2006)

Skybean said:


> 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.


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## invincible (Sep 13, 2002)

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.


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## I-275westcoastfl (Feb 15, 2005)

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.


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## Xusein (Sep 27, 2005)

Here: Go in any direction but south


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## djm19 (Jan 3, 2005)

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.


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## MexAmericanMoose (Nov 19, 2005)

desirous said:


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


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## FREKI (Sep 27, 2005)

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 :rock: ) 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


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## AndySocks (Dec 8, 2005)

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.


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## miamicanes (Oct 31, 2002)

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".


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## Azn_chi_boi (Mar 11, 2005)

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


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## desirous (Jun 10, 2006)

AndySocks said:


> 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?


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## hkskyline (Sep 13, 2002)

*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."


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## melbguy (Jan 23, 2007)

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).


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## PedroGabriel (Feb 5, 2007)

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.


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## city_thing (May 25, 2006)

invincible said:


> 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'm pretty sure that the WWII invasion line went from Brisbane to Adelaide. That means that Perth would have been left to the Japanese if they had invaded. This is always a sore point with Westralians that want independence (still a very popular idea here).


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## hkskyline (Sep 13, 2002)

*Asia's mega-cities 'more vulnerable to disasters'*
AFP
Tue, Nov 13, 2012

Asia's cities are becoming increasingly vulnerable to natural disasters as they struggle with poor planning, population explosions and climate change, the Asian Development Bank warned on Tuesday.

Floods, earthquakes and other disasters claim tens of thousands of lives a year and cost billions of dollars in the region's cities and urban areas, but not nearly enough is being done to improve their defences, the bank said.

"The region has borne the brunt of the physical and economic damage of the sharp rise in natural disasters (globally) since the 1980s," the ADB said in a statement accompanying the release of a new study.

"Its people are four times more likely to be affected by natural disasters than in Africa, and 25 times more likely than in Europe or North America," it added.

Floods are the most common peril and have become three times more frequent across the Asia-Pacific in the past 30 years, the report said.

It found that the impact of storms on cities and urban areas has worsened due to chaotic urban planning and environmental degradation, as well as poorly-managed urbanisation and deforestation.

Meanwhile, millions of people are leaving safer rural areas for low-lying coastal cities, often driven to the economic hubs by poverty.

More than 152 million people in the Asia-Pacific are now vulnerable to natural disasters every year, up from 24 million in the 1980s, the study found.

Deaths from natural disasters across the region increased to more than 651,000 between 2000 and 2009, compared with fewer than 100,000 in the 1980s, it said.

Vinod Thomas, director-general for independent evaluation at the Philippines-based ADB, said governments in the region spent two thirds of disaster funds on restoring damaged infrastructure.

But only a third was spent on making these areas more disaster-proof.

"We have thought for too long that natural disasters come and go, that they are just an interruption to development, and that they can simply be dealt with after they strike," Thomas said.

"However, there is growing international recognition that the incidence and impact of natural disasters are increasing for a variety of reasons: persistent poverty, population growth, and climate change.

"Policymakers need to recognise that investments in disaster risk management are an essential means to sustain growth."


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## diablo234 (Aug 18, 2008)

Some examples of evacuation plans for the US Gulf Coast. These plans are usually implemented when a hurricane is forecasted to hit the area.

*Louisiana:*









http://www.ohsep.louisiana.gov/evacinfo/SEHurriGuide.pdf

*Texas:*









http://ftp.dot.state.tx.us/pub/txdot-info/trv/evacuation/all_coastal.pdf


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## Dahlis (Aug 29, 2008)

Stockholm isnt in any danger from natural disasters, we have however always been prepared for war and bomb shelters exist throughout the city.

No other city country in the world (except maybe for switzerland) has the same amount of underground shelters. In Stockholm County there are about 14500 shelters with space for 1,7 million people.









Katarinaberget bomb shelter, finished in 1957 as the first nuclear bomb proof air raid shelter, it has space for 20000 people. The shelter is normally used as a parking garage. Image from Stockholmskällan.


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