Although there are times when we could use the rain, it’s probably just as well that hurricanes do not strike Colorado.
For one thing, we already have an ample supply of threats to our way of life, among them tornadoes, flash floods, the Independence Institute, blizzards, wildfires and hailstorms of biblical proportions.
For another, our evacuation plans may lead to something even worse than what we saw from Texas last week, with a dozen lanes of northbound traffic so gridlocked that people were running out of gas long before they escaped the Rita zone.
I say this not because I am privy to any current metropolitan disaster evacuation plans in Colorado, but because I remember one from the early 1980s. Ronald Reagan had just taken office, and the Cold War with the old Soviet Union seemed to be heating up.
Colorado Springs, since it was next to Cheyenne Mountain and the headquarters of the North American Aerospace Defense Command, would have been a prime target for a Soviet nuclear strike.
With that in the background, the Chaffee County Civil Defense director came by the newspaper office one afternoon. He asked if I had a few minutes, and we retired to a back room with some coffee.
“You won’t believe what those lamebrains in Washington have planned for us,” he said.
“Try me and see,” I responded.
“To begin with, their theory is that a nuclear war would not start with a surprise attack on Colorado Springs. They anticipate a period of rising tensions before the warheads start raining.”
I nodded.
“And at some point during this period leading to World War III, the civilian population of Colorado Springs would be evacuated. Guess where they want them to go?”
There are a number of locales closer to the Springs – Hartsel, Guffey, Cripple Creek, Florissant – that are just as poorly equipped as Salida and Buena Vista to handle 250,000 refugees, but I guessed right.
“Chaffee County it is. We’re supposed to house the evacuees from the Springs,” he said.
“In a way it makes sense, because if the Soviet missiles were reasonably accurate, then Pikes Peak, along with prevailing winds from the west, would keep most of the radioactive fallout away from here.”
But in all other ways, he said, it made no sense.
“With what we have on hand, we couldn’t feed them all lunch, let alone sustain them for days or weeks.
” And it had better happen in the summer when they can camp outside, because we don’t have shelter for them. And I hate to think of the sanitation problems.”
“Let me get this straight,” I said. “You’re telling me that the feds have designated us as the evacuation zone for Colorado Springs, but they haven’t given you a stockpile so that we can feed and shelter them?”
He nodded. “That’s exactly the case. I don’t even know why they told me, since they’re not going to give us any help, and this is way beyond our resources. We’re basically set up to handle a few dozen people for a few days who had to evacuate on account of a forest fire or flash flood.”
We batted around some ideas, most of them at least as silly as the federal evacuation plan, like requiring every county resident to join the LDS Church, so that they’d keep a year’s worth of food at home, and thus Chaffee County, population then approximately 14,000, would be able to feed the Springs’ evacuees for up to 20 days.
But as our conversation progressed – he was hoping I could find some journalistic way to inform the local populace without causing a run on ammunition sales occasioned by residents who wanted to protect their homes from desperate metropolitan hordes – a bright spot finally emerged.
“They’re all supposed to drive here?” I asked.
“They are,” he said, “and now that you mention it, both highway routes [U.S. 24, or Colorado 115 and U.S. 50] are narrow, twisting mountain roads. A car runs out of gas or gets a flat tire, or there’s a rockslide or an accident, something that’s bound to happen right away – that road will be plugged tight.”
He brightened. “Sorry for taking up your time. I don’t think I’ll need you to put anything in the paper, since this looks like one of those problems that will solve itself – at least on our end of things.”
Ed Quillen of Salida (ed@cozine.com) is a former newspaper editor whose column appears Tuesday and Sunday.
