Could New York Manage An Evacuation?
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With more than 2 million residents fleeing Hurricane Rita in Texas stuck in 100-mile, 14-hour traffic jams, some people are asking: If evacuating Houston is this hard, how would 8 million people ever get out of New York in an emergency?
Earlier this week, the Democratic mayoral candidate, Fernando Ferrer, seized on the issue and said the city’s Office of Emergency Management needed to rethink how it was going to execute any kind of mass evacuation, even if it involved only certain sections of the city.
Standing in front of a designated evacuation site on Staten Island, the Michael J. Petrides High School, Mr. Ferrer said the city was underestimating the number of people who would need to flee in the event of a hurricane, and that as a result it would not have the resources in place to transport residents to shelters or to accommodate them once they arrived.
“Given that New York City is the third most vulnerable major U.S. city to the effects of a major hurricane, we need to have a plan that will be practical, effective and efficient,” Mr. Ferrer said in a statement. “When the current plan doesn’t even cover the amount of evacuees that the OEM believes would need to be sheltered, we have a problem.”
A spokesman for the OEM, Jarrod Bernstein, defended the city’s plan and said recent criticisms were based on an incomplete understanding. Mr. Bernstein was quoted earlier this week saying that Mr. Ferrer’s attack was “a politically opportunistic critique.” He said that the entire city of New York “could” be evacuated if necessary, but that “it would take time.” He declined to speculate on how much time it would take. He said the effort would entail the use of boats, school buses, MTA buses, Amtrak, and the Long Island Rail Road.
On Monday, the city’s evacuation plan will be the subject of a City Council hearing, where the commissioner of the OEM, Joseph Bruno, and disaster experts, including representatives from the Red Cross, have been invited to testify.
Yesterday, the chairman of the council’s Committee on Public Safety, Peter Vallone Jr., said even he did not have a full handle on the evacuation plan.
“If part of our evacuation plan involves the use of the George Washington Bridge, and the Port Authority deems it necessary to close that bridge down because of high winds, who makes the final decision regarding a closure?” he asked yesterday during a telephone interview. “There is so much cooperation that is necessary that we need to know well beforehand who is going to be responsible for what.”
Mr. Vallone said the City Council committee would look “intensely” at the city’s hurricane evacuation plans, but that officials needed to be prepared for a mass exodus of millions of people for any natural disaster, terrorist attack, or accident at the Indian Point nuclear power plant.
“Obviously, a terrorist attack is also a concern,” Mr. Vallone said. “There have also been concerns about an evacuation in the event of a problem at Indian Point. Even a wartime evacuation is not inconceivable if we’re threatened with a nuclear weapon.”
Peter Gudaitis, the executive director of New York Disaster Interfaith Services, a nonprofit group, said the city did have a good model in place, but that it could be doing more to put its plan to practice. He also said the Federal Emergency Management Administration and the state needed to be more involved.
“There are good conceptual plans in place, but there is not enough money and there has not been enough drilling or tabletop exercises to bang out the kinks,” said Mr. Gudaitis, who is scheduled to testify at Monday’s hearing. “What New Orleans showed us is that there had not been enough physical rehearsing, frankly, to demonstrate the holes in the plan.”
“If New York City had to evacuate, it’s not just whether New York City and OEM is prepared, because I think they are primarily,” Mr. Gudaitis said. “Is FEMA prepared to evacuate 7 million people to another location? OEM’s jurisdiction ends at the city lines.”
A 19-page report released last week by a state Assembly committee found that the city did not have enough designated shelter space for the estimated number of people who would need housing in the event of a Category 4 hurricane like Katrina.
It also found that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority might not be prepared to mobilize enough buses and that the public needed to be better informed about where to go and what to do in the event of an evacuation.
Mr. Bernstein, the OEM spokesman, said that many of the questions highlighted by the committee and by Assemblyman Richard Brodsky, who led the investigation, have “already been answered.” In addition, he said, much of the recent criticism was based on an incomplete understanding of the plan that, among other things, failed to recognize the low probability of a Category 4 storm hitting this region.
Mr. Brodsky met with the OEM commissioner, Mr. Bruno, yesterday, but according to the assemblyman, the commissioner did not provide any more detail about the city’s planned response.
Mr. Bruno did, however, agree to testify in front of the Assembly’s Committee on Corporations, Authorities & Commissions on September 29.
“We’re going to get the plan,” Mr. Brodsky told The New York Sun. “This is all going to come out.”