EVACUATION REPORT CARD, 2006
PERCENT OF POPULATION THAT COULD BE EVACUATED IN 12 HOURS

GRADE: A
1 Kansas City 90.0
GRADE: B
2 Columbus 82.3
3 Memphis 80.5
4 Pittsburgh 80.4
GRADE: C
5 Indianapolis 79.2
6 Cincinnati 79.0
7 Cleveland 74.5
8 Orlando 74.1
9 San Antonio 73.5
10 St. Louis 70.6
11 Dallas-Fort Worth 70.5
GRADE: D
12 New Orleans 67.3
13 Austin 66.2
14 Providence 65.9
15 Milwaukee 65.2
16 Baltimore 62.6
17 Sacramento 60.3
GRADE: F
18 Denver 59.8
19 Tampa-St. Petersburg 58.9
20 Virginia Beach 57.4
21 Houston 54.8
22 Boston 49.4
22 Philadelphia 49.4
24 Atlanta 48.1
25 Portland 47.7
26 Minneapolis-St. Paul 47.5
27 Las Vegas 47.4
28 Detroit 47.3
29 Washington 44.9
30 Phoenix 43.6
31 Seattle 39.9
32 San Diego 37.8
33 San Francisco-San Jose 37.2
34 Miami 36.9
35 New York 31.5
36 Chicago 28.0
37 Los Angeles 25.6
*source: American Highway Users Alliance
After Washington bombed its last disaster-preparedness test, officials seek ways to make city safer

By JULIA DAHL

On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Karen Brandt was sitting at her desk at a legal firm on 16th and L streets, listening to the radio. When news hit that a plane had flown into the Pentagon, she and her colleagues turned on CNN.

“We were just a few blocks from the White House,”Brandt recalls. “And people were saying that’s what they were going to hit next.”

Anxious to get out of the city but unable to contact her parents or her boyfriend with her cell phone, Brandt started walking up Connecticut Avenue toward Dupont Circle.

“It was very quiet,” she says. “Everybody was moving fast with their heads down. It was like ants escaping a squished ant hill.”

Finally, Karen reached her father who arrived 45 minutes later to pick her up and bring her home to Maryland. But the trip took much longer than expected.

“Connecticut [Avenue] was like a parking lot,” she says. “We cut over to Georgia Avenue, but it still took us three and a half hours to get out of the city.”

More than five years later, Washington isn’t much better prepared to help residents get out of the city quickly — though city officials say that for the first time, they are now working with neighboring states to come up with a better evacuation plan.

On Oct. 12, 2006, the American Highway Users Alliance issued its first Emergency Evacuation Report Card, a study that graded 37 major American cities on their ability to evacuate citizens. Washington got an F.

Using three main criteria — exit-route capacity, internal circulation and car accessibility — the study assessed how many of Washington’s residents could get out of the city within 12 hours. The result? Less than 50 percent.

To Greg Cohen, president and chief executive officer of the highway alliance, the nonprofit that conducted the study, the city’s grade didn’t come as a surprise.

“Washington, D.C., has the third-worst traffic congestion in the country,” Cohen says.

But he says the problem has been festering for years. He points to the anti-freeway movement of the 1960s that halted completion of several main arteries through the metropolitan area — including Interstates 395 and 266 — as well as the planned expansion of Interstate 66, all of which have left Washington with little internal traffic capacity. The result, he says, is that the roads that the District Department of Transportation designates as evacuation routes — including Georgia, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Pennsylvania avenues — are over-used and, as Brandt and her father found out, unreliable as quick emergency exits.

The federal government was sufficiently alarmed by the highway alliance’s findings that less than a month after the report was issued, Cohen was invited to the Capitol to brief the House Committee on Homeland Security about the problem.

“They weren’t really thinking about transportation,” Cohen says. “But they realize now that this is one piece of a larger puzzle.”

Actually constructing new roadways in a city with dense population and natural water barriers is nearly impossible, according to Cohen.

“Building new roads is a real financial burden,” says Chris Voss, division chief for planning, transportation, exercises and mitigation for the District Emergency Management Agency. “Unless I get trillions of dollars for construction, we have to work with what we have.”

According to Voss, Washington is preparing for two emergency scenarios. The first would be a Sept. 11-style terrorist attack, for which there would be little or no warning and might trigger a mass panic. The second is a weather emergency like Hurricane Isabel in 2003, which can be foreseen and prepared for.

Last month, Voss met with officials from Virginia, Maryland, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, the Red Cross and the Department of Homeland Security to work on the National Capitol Region Mass Care and Evacuation Plan, which he says should be finalized by October. The plan, Voss says, is trying to create a “seamless approach”to disaster management, attempting to coordinate everything from traffic-light timing to the delivery of medical supplies across the metropolitan area. Jurisdictions once made independent decisions, such as closing bridges and roads, but now recognize the importance of working together.

“Those decisions caused backup, and we’re focused on remedying that,” Voss says. “We need to merge evacuation and mass care, instead of thinking of the two things as separate issues.”

REUTERS photo by Yves Hermain
A combination of overcrowded roadways and natural water barriers make Washington, D.C. one of the most difficult cities in the country to evacuate.

Instead of waiting to coordinate relief supplies until thousands of people are stranded in a place like the New Orleans Superdome, Voss and his colleagues are trying to put a system in place that anticipates what would be needed in an emergency and streamline the process of requesting and delivering those necessities.

But many Washington-area residents aren’t waiting for the government to get ready for a disaster: They’re taking on the responsibility themselves.

“Emergency preparedness is a hot topic right now,” says Amy Ward, director of the DC Citizen Corps, a federal program created in the aftermath of Sept.11. Citizen Corps trains citizens to help their communities prepare for and recover from an emergency. The group offers free classes for anyone who wants to become a member of a Community Emergency Response Team. Team members attend class two nights a week for two months and are trained in search and rescue, fire safety, medical operations and disaster psychology. In the event of an emergency, they become, according to Ward, the “non-professional first responders.” They’ll be able to perform triage on injured people and will be familiar with the particular dangers of their neighborhoods and the best routes in and out.

“If they live in a floodplain — like Foggy Bottom — they”ll know about sandbagging,” Ward explains. “And if they live in a wind corridor, they’ll have learned about tree removal.”

Ward and her colleagues at Citizen Corps are using global imaging systems to map where response team members live — Chevy Chase has the most — and identify which metropolitan areas still need outreach. So far, 1,500 area residents, including Boy Scout troops and elderly people in assisted-living facilities, have graduated from the program, and Citizen Corps has conducted response training for employees of several government agencies.

Some private firms are also making emergency preparedness a priority, though not all citizens are jumping onto the “be prepared” bandwagon.

When attorney Maureen Browne arrived for her first day at work at the Heller Ehrman law firm, she received an “evac pack” from the firm’s facilities coordinator. But Browne, whose husband was at a meeting at the Pentagon on the morning of Sept. 11, didn’t pay much attention to the flashlight, vest and laminated cheat sheet inside.

“Evacuation training was one of the first things they scheduled me to do,” Browne says. “But I haven’t gotten around to it yet.”

Like most of her friends, Browne says she and her husband have talked about contingency plans in the event of an emergency, but beyond who’s going to pick up their 2-year-old son from day care, they’ve decided it’s not worth it to concoct an elaborate escape scheme.

“You have to be pragmatic about the nature of the attack,” Browne says. “Do I want to die in my car trying to get out? Or do I want to die at home with my family?”