Disaster evacuation plans for Denver and other major cities in Colorado are under review in the wake of the two hurricanes that ravaged the Gulf Coast. That’s a relief because it’s invaluable to learn from the unprecedented experiences of New Orleans and Houston, which undertook the largest evacuations in the country’s history.
While Colorado is not in the path of a hurricane, emergency experts try to envision such events as an earthquake, a killer tornado, a hazardous materials spill, or a terrorist attack (such as a plane crashing into the Pueblo chemical depot), emergency officials say.
Thanks to 24-hour cable coverage, all of us witnessed the migration – first from New Orleans, then Houston – plans that made sense on paper but proved flawed in real-life emergencies. While New Orleans evacuated 1 million people in less than two days, 200,000 poor, sick and elderly residents were left behind to fend for themselves. Hundreds died.
In Houston, city officials planned to evacuate 1.5 million people ahead of Hurricane Rita. Twice that number joined the exodus, clogging highways for hours. As it turned out, the best-laid plans did not account for human behavior or changing circumstances.
New Orleans officials now acknowledge that school buses and other resources should have been deployed sooner to help people without vehicles or stuck in hospitals and nursing homes. In Houston, motorists ran out of gas and patience. Texas officials now say fuel and tow trucks were needed along the evacuation routes. Highway on-ramps needed to be blocked to avoid chaos.
“Absolutely, we will learn from this,” said Michael Beasley, executive director of the Colorado Department of Local Affairs, which oversees tens of millions of dollars in federal homeland security grants. While things like reverse traffic flows will need to be incorporated into state evacuation plans, one of the great lessons from New Orleans and Houston is the importance of educating the public about emergency plans, Beasley said.
There are limitations, for example, to Colorado’s getaway routes, and evacuees would have to be armed with fuel as well as patience. “If anyone out there thinks I-70 is the way to evacuate a few million people, we can’t even get skiers back [to Denver] on a Sunday night without a major traffic jam,” Beasley said. “But the infrastructure is what it is … we would have problems. It’s unrealistic to think that the infrastructure we have will handle a mass evacuation in two or three hours.”
Tracy Howard, acting director of Denver’s Office of Emergency Management, said the city last updated its emergency disaster plans in 2002, although earlier this year officials realized they had no plan in place for people with special needs. A Denver police captain skilled in emergency management is now assigned to work on a plan to identify and evacuate people who use wheelchairs and other assistance devices. “We will have to work through RTD or the schools to provide transportation for them,” Howard said.
The city is also working on a plan to evacuate the downtown business district. A funding request of about $400,000 for this year was turned down, but it has been resubmitted for 2006. It involves a significant hardware and software plan, resynchronizing street lights via computer and providing a communications and notification system for people and buildings. A simulated terrorist evacuation of the Republic Plaza building in 2003 went “relatively well,” Howard said, but “things didn’t work as well as they should have.”
Under most disaster scenarios that Denver might face, Howard said, time could become an enemy. Denver might not have the luxury of an advance warning like Houston and New Orleans did. “We can’t forecast a hazardous spill or terrorist event,” he said. It might have to happen quickly and would unfold according to where and what the disaster turned out to be. Traffic might have to be routed toward the mountains on Interstate 70, which could result in massive delays, or perhaps north on Interstate 25.
Thanks to lessons from Katrina and Rita, Colorado’s disaster planners have come to realize that much needs to be done. Howard believes Denver is “probably a year or so away from having a good, detailed plan in place” to evacuate the city. In the meantime, Beasley said he is starting to work on a plan to educate the public. Even his father, a 31-year veteran firefighter, did not have a personal disaster kit. “He had a fire extinguisher,” Beasley said. Lessons from the recent hurricanes to plan carefully and be prepared, Beasley said, “hit home.”
