BY ROSEMARY CLOUD, ALEX COHILAS, AND BILL LOWE
For an incident commander (IC), perhaps one of the rarest and most challenging elements of a major incident is managing the evacuation of a populated area. This is especially true when the affected area is residential and it is midnight, when people are sleeping, not aware of the drama, not listening to the radio, and not watching television. Although many fire departments practice the various components of responding to and resolving an incident, few officers have considered the many facets involved in an evacuation.
EVACUATION STAKEHOLDERS AND DISRUPTIONS
Every fire department, large or small, career or volunteer, faces a variety of emergency situations that could justify an IC’s having to order an evacuation. Some common scenarios that might justify an evacuation order include large fires, floods, tornadoes, and blizzards; hazardous-materials incidents (including biological, chemical, explosive, and radiological events); and civil disturbances, to name a few. The locations could be fixed, such as an industrial site, or a transportation artery, such as an interstate, a railroad, or a waterway corridor. The event could be triggered by weather phenomena, an accident, or criminal or terrorist acts.
It is likely that an evacuation order will involve multiple entities such as community service organizations, schools, elected officials, emergency management, environmental, EMS, law enforcement, fire, and public health. Additionally, multiple jurisdictions (be they adjacent city, county, state, or federal authorities) will have a role and a voice and will expect a vote in any evacuation decisions. Consequently, developing and maintaining positive personal relationships with neighboring elected and appointed officials before an evacuation event will pay huge dividends in the forms of cooperation, support, and trust.
ANTICIPATORY AND IMMEDIATE EVACUATION SCENARIOS
In today’s 24-hour worldwide television news coverage and high-speed Internet broadcasts, people are kept fully informed regarding large-scale evacuations affecting entire coastlines or inland regions. Be it an evacuation triggered by ethnic cleansing, Hurricane Katrina, or a tsunami, these large-scale evacuations generate lots of interest. A community is likely to face two distinct evacuation models: anticipatory and immediate.
Anticipatory evacuations frequently occur in the tracking of hurricanes. As the National Weather Service gathers more data on a storm’s path and surrounding weather conditions, it keeps elected and public safety leaders informed on actions they should consider. These officials begin implementing established evacuation plans to facilitate the mass departure of citizens away from threatened coastal regions.
The recent hurricane invasions on the Gulf and its bordering states are excellent examples. Both highway travel direction lanes (north and south or east and west) were converted to same-direction travel-inland only, essentially doubling the flow rate. Obviously, such drastic transportation plans require extensive planning by law enforcement and patience by everyone involved. It’s unlikely that a fire IC will face an anticipatory evacuation decision by himself at 0300 hours.
Immediate evacuations are a far more common and likely scenario for a fire officer to face at 0300 hours on a holiday weekend morning. The decision and scope of an evacuation order must strike a balance between safeguarding citizens from a serious environmental threat and overreacting to an incident. As with many incidents, these events often happen on weekends, holidays, and after hours, when the highest-ranking officers are off-duty but on call. In these cases, the IC may have to make quick decisions without the benefit of discussing the incident with higher-ranking staff officers. When in charge, take charge!
ORDERING AN EVACUATION:RISK VS. BENEFIT VS. TIME/RESOURCE CONSTRAINTS
In many cases, by the time an evacuation could be planned, executed, and accomplished, the threat may have diminished to the point that evacuees can return to their homes. In other situations, the public may be safer in their homes than going outside to get in their vehicles and travel through the hazard area to reach an evacuation shelter.
It’s a potential public relations and political misstep that will require a strong public information response. Additionally, despite gathering and processing the information about the hazard, reviewing resources to assess the threat, and then reaching an evacuation decision, lives and injuries could be at risk regardless of the decision implemented. Consequently, ensuring that fire department personnel know their local hazards and have the skills and abilities to develop reaction scenarios are critical to preparing for an alarm.
A question all fire chiefs need to be prepared to answer is, “If you have a fixed hazard in your community, what steps have you taken today should an evacuation be justified tomorrow?” If the chief responds, “I haven’t looked at that yet, but it’s on the agenda when time permits. My vacation starts next week, but when I get back …,” that’s unacceptable. Identifying local hazard occupancies, developing some threat scenarios, and creating a preliminary response/evacuation plan for the adjacent areas are proactive and reasonable steps for enhancing public safety. For a station officer filling in for the vacationing battalion chief, it would be most useful to make available a couple of pages of evacuation guidelines to structure the decision making.
EVACUATION ORDERS:CONTROL ELEMENTS AND LIMITING NEGATIVE CONSEQUENCES
Once an IC decides an evacuation is justified to safeguard lives, the following tactics and strategies should be considered when developing the evacuation plan:
• Carefully consider the public evacuation announcement, and provide a written copy that is to be read exactly as scripted. If police officers and emergency personnel drive through neighborhoods improvising their own announcements, there is greater likelihood that miscommunication and chaos will occur. The message “There’s a poison gas cloud spreading into this area. LEAVE IMMEDIATELY, or you might DIE!” will create panic and confusion as citizens gather their family members and pets and seek to contact nearby close friends, call 911 for additional information, and so on. Although it’s easy to dismiss such an announcement as one that will “never happen in my agency; we’re too professional,” think again. The officers might have been told, “This is a life-and-death event, so get people moving, and moving NOW!” A generic draft could be authored as part of the planning process and then customized for an actual incident.
• Consider a staged and staggered evacuation announcement whereby those in most danger are notified and evacuated before extending the evacuation area and announcements. For example, first notify the downhill and downwind areas directly adjacent to a chemical release, and the evacuation would spread out like ripples on a pond. Establish evacuation routes away from hazard areas, and position emergency units and transportation officials at major transportation arteries to direct citizens to safer locations. In many cases, drivers can be informed of the locations of evacuation shelters as they are directed to safety.
• Preidentify and evaluate possible evacuation shelters that are widely dispersed inside and outside your community. Some obvious criteria for shelters include the following: large public areas suitable for sleeping and socializing, private areas for changing clothes, restrooms, access to television so evacuees can be kept informed, sufficient parking, and food and water services. Chiefs should think in terms of redundancy and distance between shelters so a large event will not affect all of a community’s shelters. Public schools, municipal buildings, and churches are logical and convenient shelters. Shelters need to have the contact information updated often with regular meetings with shelter representative to ensure their willingness and readiness to contribute.
• Each shelter should have a director who reports to the incident command’s shelter sector officer. This officer must have the authority to address shelter issues such as ordering food, water, portable johns, telephones, and so on. The American Red Cross and Salvation Army are reliable and invaluable resources for providing logistical support such as food and beverages for shelter operations. Law enforcement or security officers should be assigned to each shelter to maintain order and exert a positive influence over the behavior of evacuees. Emotions and concerns will naturally be high, so there is the potential for frustration-caused eruptions, as seen during Hurricane Katrina. Medical personnel should be present to evaluate injuries and medical conditions and to assist patients who need to have replaced prescription medications misplaced during the chaos.
• Expect that the emergency dispatch center will be overwhelmed with calls for information and assistance. During an evacuation, call in extra dispatchers and supervisors. The dispatch center should have reserve telephone lines and call stations; the extra personnel can staff them.
• Incident command should establish an “elected official liaison” sector. Expect anxious and worried elected officials to try to influence the IC with different priority actions. Have an active and visible role for these elected officials so they can contact their respective district’s precinct and neighborhood community leaders with information regarding the evacuation or assist with shelter operations.
• Develop a process for identifying residents with special needs and the types of additional assistance they will require during the event. Perhaps other community service organizations can acquire and maintain this information. Waiting until an evacuation is in progress to learn of a bedridden paralyzed citizen who has to be moved with a customized bed and respirator will involve many responders and take significant time.
• Large-scale evacuations are lengthy. When it becomes apparent that the event will be a long campaign, the IC should establish a mandatory rotation schedule for response and incident command personnel. Evacuation incidents can reasonably be expected to last more than 24 hours, so senior staff will have to be rotated to get rest and rehab.
• As the incident is being resolved, designate an officer to start planning how to get the evacuated residents back to their homes. Waiting until the incident is over and then telling evacuees, “It’s safe! You can go back home,” is not going to be well received by tired, hungry, and bewildered citizens. The commander needs to coordinate with the transit authority or school officials to provide buses to take the residents to their homes. Give residents a flyer/fact sheet advising them of what to expect in the next few hours or days. Assign police and fire units to neighborhoods to provide information and assistance to citizens as they return home.
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Officers should fully appreciate the logistical challenges and raw emotions involved in ordering 1,000 residents, with their pets and possessions, to leave their homes now. Once you direct residents to leave, their safety, comfort, and welfare become the IC’s responsibility. They will expect and demand that you provide shelter, food, water, baby food, diapers, dog food, prescription medication, security, frequent information as the event develops, communication with their families, and so on. If it’s tough to imagine the challenges while reading this article, imagine it is 0215 hours in your richest or poorest neighborhood. Perhaps the above fundamental steps will provide chiefs and officers with a trigger for evaluating their evacuation readiness stage and starting the brainstorming process. ■
■ ROSEMARY CLOUD is chief of the East Point (GA) Fire Department. She previously served as an assistant chief in the Atlanta (GA) Fire Department, supervising fire and rescue protection at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport (the world’s busiest passenger airport). Cloud has a bachelor of science in applied behavioral science and is a graduate of Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government Executive Education.
■ ALEX COHILAS is chief of the Clayton County (GA) Fire Department. He has extensive experience with company and battalion-level line operations and served as the president of the department’s largest employee organization for more than 10 years. Additionally, he was an investigator with one of the Southeast’s most prominent law firms, specializing in public administration law.
■ BILL LOWE, EMT-P, MIfireE, EFO, is a captain/shift supervisor with the Clayton County (GA) Fire Department. He has a doctorate in human resource management and is a graduate of the National Fire Academy’s Executive Fire Officer program.
