Evacuation

It’s a cold, grey, rainy day in the Ozarks. Some people might use the word dreary but, I don’t. I like this kind of weather. Maybe I’m a fan of the dreary, I don’t know. For some reason, to me, days like this have a calmative effect.

It’s a bad situation out in southern California with the fires and the Santa Ana winds. I always think of that Steely Dan song where they sing; “Here come those Santa Ana winds again”.

I was just reading this piece from Breitbart/AP that says 250,000 people have been evacuated in the San Diego area. From the article…

In many cases, crews couldn’t begin to fight the fires because they were too busy rescuing residents who refused to leave, fire officials said.

“They didn’t evacuate at all, or delayed until it was too late,” Metcalf (Bill Metcalf, chief of the North County Fire Protection District) said. “And those folks who are making those decisions are actually stripping fire resources.”

It strikes me that there is some deeply rooted instinct that makes humans resist evacuation. We have the illusion of a safe haven, maybe. Or, maybe we are just creatures of habit and don’t want to leave our comfort zones. If it is “instinct”, it’s clearly proof that you can’t rely on instinct.

I tend to look at these things through, what I perceive as cold reality. What have we actually learned from a situation like Hurricane Katrina? There’s a lot of blame to go around for what happened after the hurricane. You can blame local (city) government, state government, federal government, the Corps of Engineers, and FEMA all you want to for how things were handled before and after the event. But, the cold reality is that if the population had evacuated, then the impact of the tragedy would be far less.

That is over simplifying, I know that. I also know that it’s easy to reason; to see with cold reality from afar. I’ve asked myself the hypothetical; What I would have done if I was living in New Orleans before the hurricane? The honest answer is, that I probably would not have been anxious to uproot and evacuate.

In the case of Katrina and every other kind of disaster, the evacuation is not just a protection against that disaster. It’s protection against the aftermath, the effect of the disaster on the infrastructure.

As we go along in this world, all of these disasters will have more impact because the population is more concentrated. That being a fact, you can say that every level of government bears some responsibility for evacuation planning.

The final decision though is going to come down to the individual unless we are talking about forced evacuation. So, really it’s a question of will rather than preparation. You have to be willing to get out; willing to go against instinct possibly.

I was a child of the cold war. Growing up, I knew where the closest fallout shelter was at any given time. They were in public buildings, like schools and fire stations. Some were at private institutions like banks. The places to go were provided but the mindset, the idea that the bomb could come at any time and you need to know where to go; the mindset was instilled by family and society.

Maybe that’s what we need to work on. Maybe we need to have the mindset to leave if the situation occurs.

Planning only goes so far. How are you going to plan for an earthquake and what the effects are on the infrastructure? Even if you have a plan to evacuate, the plan is going to have to change.

You can’t plan everything. You do have to be willing to leave.