how do mandatory evacuations work?

[cellio]

We sometimes hear about mandatory evacuations because of storms (hurricanes, winter storms, etc). Hearing about one a couple of years ago that was announced on a Saturday morning prompted me to ask this question about evacuations on Shabbat. Now the question of timing has come up.

I've been fortunate to never have to evacuate my home or city. (Buildings yes, but that's different.) I have this impression, perhaps informed by Hollywood rather than reality, that announcements get broadcast far and wide and then police or National Guard or whoever start going through the area making sure people clear out, and you maybe have an hour or two to get underway at best. But then I thought about the logistics of that, and I'm wondering if you really have several hours, maybe the better part of a day, to do your prep and get out.

I'm not talking about cases where the problem is immediate (there's just been an earthquake, the missile will strike in half an hour, etc), but about other cases where the threat is dire enough that there is an evacuation but it might not be "drop everything and go right now" -- the storm is making landfall tonight, cases where you have (or think you have) time to get everybody home from work/school so you can leave together, pack your car, contact people outside the affected area to arrange for shelter, etc. I realize it's a good idea to get out as soon as you can, if nothing else because of traffic, but we know people don't always do that (and can't always, if not everybody is together to start with).

So for those of you who've been through these kinds of evacuations, or who know more about it than I do, what's the timeline usually like? How long do people take to clear out?

Comments

[mortuus.livejournal.com]

I was a Red Cross volunteer in Utah for a few years and helped out once when there was an evacuation of a large part of a town due to a fire on the mountain. They got about half an hour of notice to pack up and head out. I don't know how they were notified, though. It was at night (I got the phone call at midnight to head to the Red Cross building to join the contingent to set up the shelter, so that was probably quite soon after the residents were notified, or around the same time), so I'm guessing door to door, since I know that is done.

So, really, not much time at all!

(They got the fire under control the next day and no homes were damaged.)

[mortuus.livejournal.com]

Oh, and the traffic discussion above, yeah, that would be a nightmare. In my fire example, it was a small town, so traffic wasn't an issue. Cities amplify everything, though!

[spiritdancer]

They probably used an emergency phone notification system - that way you can "call" large numbers of phones to get the word out.

My husband's office has such a system to notify their 8000+ employees of things such as a weather-related shutdown. It's a good system, if a bit alarming when the house phone and both cell phones start ringing at the exact same time :-). It definitely gets your attention. Oh, and their particular setup requires pushing a key after you hear the message; if you just hang up, you immediately get another call.

[spiritdancer]

Drat, this was _supposed_ to be a reply to a comment above about how a town could be notified to evacuate in under 30 minutes.

[cellio]

My previous employer had a system like that. It didn't call back immediately, but it cycled among cell phone, house phone, and email addresses (work and home) until it got an "I heard you".

[cellio]

Thanks for sharing your experience. Yikes -- on one hand half an hour is almost no time, and on the other taking that long can be deadly when the threat is fire.