Emergency Exit

ON SEPTEMBER 11TH, 2005, Sam Roberts of The New York Times found himself wondering how to evacuate the entire island of Manhattan in case of emergency.

“Today,” he wrote, “four years after the September 11, 2001, attacks and in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, there is still no single plan to evacuate all of New York, which virtually no one believes is possible.”

The very idea of it—in response to nuclear terrorism, natural disaster, or even an epidemic disease—inspires dread. As the former director of New York’s emergency management team explained in the same article, the task “would not be easy and it would not be pretty.” Roberts urged readers to “imagine trying to move more than eight million New Yorkers—including the high number of people without cars—through streets that are clogged on an ordinary day and then through the tunnels and over the bridges that connect New York’s islands to the mainland and to one another.”

Of course, these mass mobilizations already occur every workday: Nearly two million people commute to, through, or from the island of Manhattan. But the specter of a smallpox outbreak, or a mushroom cloud over Times Square—or even bombs on the bridges and in the tunnels—would quickly transform the orderly movement of calm citizens into unmanageable bedlam. Not to mention that getting each and every last person out of Manhattan, Roberts reminded us, “would be fraught with nightmarish challenges, like rescuing people from hospitals and nursing homes and reversing traffic flows”—and then you would have to find somewhere to put everyone, whether that means tens of thousands of governmentally subsidized hotel rooms or even refugee camps in the Hudson Valley. Worse, “much of the planning assumes that people already know what to do.”

In their November 14, 2005, issue, New York magazine ran a series of short articles on the same subject. It offered readers an illustrated glimpse of some hypothetical catastrophes—and their aftermath—including a chlorine gas explosion, mass blackouts, an avian flu pandemic, and even a massive earthquake. The magazine’s survival tips, however, were glaringly less extraordinary: New Yorkers are told simply to hoard food and water, to buy a flashlight, to keep an eye on the news (or an ear, listening to a battery-powered radio), and to wear convenient clothing—all of which implies that when the apocalypse arrives, it will be rather prosaic.

Like Roberts’ article, New York magazine touched upon the idea that “our planning and our imagination fail to meet the reality” of urban disaster. One of the clearest failures lies in relying upon private transport—specifically, the automobile—for evacuation. 

When Hurricane Rita hit land near Houston, Texas, in September 2005, the regional—and mandatory—evacuation was left to the private sector. That is to say, families and individuals for the most part had to find their own best way to safety. As the BBC reported, this predictably resulted in “traffic jams, fuel shortages, and full flights” as residents attempted “to run from Hurricane Rita.” The traffic got so bad—reportedly 93 miles long north of the city—that some frustrated evacuees simply “abandon[ed] their cars and possessions when their vehicles ran out of petrol on the motorway.”

Adding to the absurdity of bad planning, the National Guard briefly became an armed gas-delivery service, escorting shipments of fuel to gas stations and marooned drivers.

Unfortunately, the highway system—or automotive infrastructure, more broadly speaking—is all most people will have in case of a mass evacuation (although if speed is not an issue, evacuation by foot is a more universal option). This is so clearly the case that the American Highway Users Alliance (AHUA) has published its own Emergency Evacuation Report Card 2006, which ranks 37 American cities according to their “exit capacity,” “automobile access,” and “internal traffic flow,” among other criteria.

What they found is not good news. While Kansas City tops the AHUA’s final list as the most evacuation-friendly city in the nation, San Francisco, Miami, New York, and Chicago rank at the very bottom—with Los Angeles practically falling off the chart below them. To put it bluntly, you do not want to find yourself in a populous city during a disaster. In fact, the most difficult cities in America to evacuate—all receiving solid F’s—include every major American city: from Boston to Las Vegas, Philadelphia to Washington, D.C., Phoenix to Minneapolis-St. Paul.

The AHUA’s recommendations, addressed to any city regardless of population that hopes to prepare itself for evacuations, are as commonsense as New York magazine’s survival guide. The AHUA insists that local and regional governments, in cooperation with federal authorities, “undertake special efforts to plan effectively for the evacuation of people without access to cars.” That goes double for New York City, where, it adds, “due to the unusually high number of mass transit-dependent households,” urban authorities must be prepared for bus-based evacuations, “with a supplemental role for commuter rail.”

The report says, however, with a noticeable air of understatement: “Based upon the experiences in New Orleans and Houston, it is clear that there are considerable opportunities for improvement in mass transit dependent evacuation programs.”

Evacuating Manhattan may be an especially difficult task—though no worse than emptying out Los Angeles—but truly evacuating any American city is something that most urban planning departments have not yet begun to address or even to comprehend.