Back around 1980, I volunteered to review a U.S. Government plan from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to evacuate Seattle to east of the Cascades in case of the threat of nuclear war. I had been attending meetings with the Physicians for Social Responsibility and they needed someone with a technical background to evaluate the plan.
The plan contained instructions for moving the majority of the population of Seattle over the mountains to eastern Washington to be housed in schools and other public buildings. One of the problems with evacuating Seattle is the fact that the city is surrounded by mountains and bodies of water with only a few major highways.
I wasn’t sure exactly how to approach an evaluation until I came upon an analysis of a plan to evacuate Denver, Colorado. Denver has some of the same issues that Seattle has with respect to landscapes and limited highways. The evaluation was very thorough and took into account the fact that state transportation departments have very reliable calculation for estimating the number of lane blocking incidents in a given period of time based on the number of vehicles on the road in that period. A nuclear evacuation would yield much worse numbers than usual because of panicked drivers, people fleeing with low gas, etc. The Denver study concluded that within twelve hours of a call for evacuation EVERY major freeway out of Denver would be blocked and impassable. The original Denver plan called for a three day evacuation. The evaluation said that authorities would be lucky to evacuate the city in three weeks given what would certainly happen on the roads.
Comparing the Seattle evacuation plan with the Denver plan, it was clear that the same sort of traffic jams would occur and that the Seattle plan to evacuate in three days was just plain unrealistic. I reported this back to the group that asked me to make the evaluation. In July 1982, Seattle Mayor Charles Royer withdrew Seattle from planning for nuclear war evacuation. He called the FEMA plans to evacuate the population of Seattle to east of the Cascades in the event of a nuclear attack "virtually useless" and stated that Seattle should not "lend credence to the dangerous idea that a nuclear war is a manageable emergency." FEMA threatened to withdraw some Federal funding that was supposed to be provided to Seattle if Seattle withdrew, but Seattle pulled out anyway.
The Federal Government has been engaged in a controversial debate over a revision of the “Protective Action Guide,” an EPA document that was written to provide guidelines on what levels of radiation should trigger protective measures such as evacuations. Activists are claiming that the proposed manual references other agencies numbers which are thousands of time higher than previous EPA guidelines. I will be writing a post about the new EPA manual in the near future but, for the time being, I just want to point out that I hope that if a nuclear evacuation anywhere in the U.S. is ever triggered, the plan is much better than the plan that FEMA came up with for Seattle in 1980.
