When the Three Mile Island nuclear generating station along the Susquehanna River seemed on the verge of a full meltdown in March 1979, Gov. Richard L. Thornburgh of Pennsylvania asked a trusted aide to make sure that the evacuation plans for the surrounding counties would work.
The aide came back ashen faced. Dauphin County, on the eastern shore of the river, planned to send its populace west to safety over the Harvey Taylor Bridge.
“All well and good,” Mr. Thornburgh said in a recent speech, “except for the fact that Cumberland County on the west shore of the river had adopted an evacuation plan that would funnel all exiting traffic eastbound over — you guessed it — the same Harvey Taylor Bridge.”
Nearly 250,000 people would have been sent in opposite directions over the same narrow bridge.
Mr. Thornburgh quickly corrected the plans, but more problems would soon arise — just as they have in many other disasters. As the Japanese are learning, the science behind herding thousands, sometimes millions, of people from danger to safety is uncertain at best. And the lessons learned from one disaster can both hurt and help with the next.
For instance, not enough people left New Orleans and the surrounding areas before Hurricane Katrina struck on August 29, 2005, and more than 1,800 people died. At least part of the cause may have been that Mayor Ray Nagin of New Orleans waited until the day before the storm hit to order a mandatory evacuation.
The lesson of Katrina? Get everybody out, and get them out early.
Three weeks later, a second major storm, Hurricane Rita, came barreling toward the Gulf Coast. Mayor Bill White of Houston, intent on avoiding the mistakes that plagued New Orleans, told everybody in the city to get out, and get out now. “The time for waiting is over,” he said.
Oops. Within hours, the interstates around Houston were at a standstill. When mandatory evacuations were later ordered for areas most at risk, those residents could not get out of harm’s way because the interstates were already packed with people from low-risk areas. Some spent days in their cars.
The state police set about turning inbound lanes into outbound ones, but that took hours. More people died or suffered health problems from the bungled evacuation than from the storm itself.
The lesson of Rita? Limit evacuations only to those most at risk, and have plans in place well in advance to reverse traffic flow patterns on major arteries.
Every one of the nation’s 104 nuclear power plants is required to have detailed evacuation and incident plans in place before operating. The plans are reviewed by federal, state and local authorities. But problems crop up and almost certainly keep being created.
Brian Wolshon, the director of the Gulf Coast Center for Evacuation and Transportation Resiliency, said that he was analyzing one county’s emergency plans that seemed to have every detail covered.
“It was a wonderful report, with plans to move senior citizens out of care facilities and even out of hospitals, and they had signed contracts with bus and ambulance providers,” said Dr. Wolshon, who is also a professor at Louisiana State University. “But that same low-cost provider had the same contract with the county next door, and they had the capacity to evacuate only one of these counties.”
Indeed, emergency authorities have only in recent years begun to realize that evacuations are often regional and even multistate events. Evacuating almost any city in the United States requires significant preparation and resources in surrounding cities. And some events are simply too resource-intensive or too complicated to plan for.
“What if you had a tsunami warning in the Atlantic Ocean and had to evacuate the Eastern Seaboard? You’re talking about tens of millions of people. Where are you going to put those people? How are you going to get them there? Good luck with that,” Dr. Wolshon said.
Residents in the 10-mile radius surrounding a nuclear power plant are supposed to receive evacuation plans routinely. Those near the Indian Point plant in Buchanan, N.Y., receive such plans annually, according to officials there. The plans are also posted on local government Web sites. And municipal authorities in towns around such plants often have stores of potassium iodide. Potassium iodide can protect people by ensuring that the thyroid gland does not take up radioactive iodine, which can cause cancer.
But Kelly Classic, a physicist at the Mayo Clinic and spokeswoman for the Health Physics Society, warned that people should not take these pills unless instructed to do so. Potassium iodide can cause problems in those with shellfish allergies or kidney, thyroid or heart ailments, she said, and its benefits are fairly short-lived. Federal health officials warned recently that consumers who try to buy the pills on the Internet may get ineffective or dangerous pills.
Radioactive fallout in Japan has so far been almost entirely confined to the 19-mile zone around the Fukushima Daiichi plant that the authorities have designated as posing the highest risk. But weather modeling has suggested that fallout from the disaster could circulate as far as Alaska and Southern California, although officials have said that there is little cause for concern.
“It won’t even be at the level of a chest X-ray,” Ms. Classic said.
Still, there may be some reasons for worry. A study of Swedish children who were in utero at the time of the Chernobyl accident in 1986 found that they fared worse on standardized academic tests than a control group of subjects. Children in the most affected parts of Sweden — hundreds of miles from the accident site — fared particularly poorly, showing scores about 5 percent lower than the control group. There is no hard evidence, however, of cause and effect.
The developing fetus is particularly sensitive to the effects of radiation.
Evacuation planning at nuclear power plants focuses mostly on residents within 10 miles because they are most at risk for direct exposure in an accident, either through inhalation or contact, said Scott Burnell, a spokesman for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. But the plans include possible measures in a secondary zone extending 50 miles from the plant to protect against contaminated foods or water, Mr. Burnell said. Farmers and ranchers in this area may be instructed during an accident to put their animals in barns and use stored feed instead of allowing them to graze.
President Obama recently asked the nuclear commission to review the safety of all of the nation’s nuclear power plants, but whether that review will include evacuation plans is as yet unknown, Mr. Burnell said.
For Mr. Thornburgh, the lessons of the Three Mile Island accident were to restrain emergency personnel who wanted to act even if such action was not warranted; to resist what he called “emergency macho,” or the tendency to stay up all night so as to be able to brag about it later; and to stay calm.
“Not helpful in this effort was the fact that the newly released film ‘The China Syndrome’ had just opened in the area, including its description of the consequences of a nuclear meltdown as rendering permanently uninhabitable an ‘area the size of the state of Pennsylvania,’ ” he said. “This was not a message calculated to put people’s minds at ease.”
