Arguably the worst natural disaster in American history, Hurricane Katrina laid waste to the U.S. Gulf Coast, forcing the federal government to issue disaster declarations for an area covering more than 90,000 square miles.
The storm and subsequent flooding overran cities large and small in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, and Americans watched nonstop television news coverage of the devastation and rescue efforts.
The collapse of key New Orleans levees got the most coverage, with images broadcast practically night and day for a week after Katrina's storm surge overtopped these embankments, flooding nearly 80 percent of the city with water up to 20 feet deep, stranding thousands and thousands of people in beleaguered neighborhoods.
The tragedy offered a stark reminder of what can happen if people can't evacuate when a major natural disaster hits. Although there are varying viewpoints about how much evacuation information citizens should have in-hand, the one echoed sentiment is that it's ultimately the citizen's responsibility to evacuate safely -- with some guidance from local government.
Taking Responsibility
On Sunday, Aug. 28, 2005, as Katrina bore down on New Orleans, Mayor Ray Nagin ordered a mandatory evacuation of the city -- the first time ever the city's mayor was forced to take such a step.
Residents who had the means to evacuate had little trouble escaping in time, and news reports cited various government officials saying 80 percent to 90 percent of New Orleans' population escaped by the time Katrina made landfall.
However, images of frantic people being plucked off their rooftops by Coast Guard helicopters got plenty of airtime as TV stations and cable news channels reported on the plight of those who didn't, or couldn't, get out of the city.
An angry American public blamed officials from the White House down to Nagin for the persistent bungling that characterized the government's response to the New Orleans disaster. The rage subsided somewhat with the passing of time, but the 2006 hurricane season's official start date of June 1 once again raises the responsibility question for residents of the Gulf Coast and other areas.
Government officials in the region have not been shy in telling the public that, first and foremost, it's a matter of personal responsibility -- individuals must prepare themselves to do what it takes to get themselves and their families out of a threatened area.
Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco held a news conference in mid-May to announce the distribution of the 2006 emergency evacuation maps for southeast Louisiana. At the news conference, she said the best chance for the state to save lives during future storms is when individuals take personal responsibility to get their families away from southeast Louisiana by studying the state evacuation maps, developing a family plan, leaving early and packing disaster supply kits, according to The Times Picayune.
Not all jurisdictions agree with that approach, however.
In Sacramento, Calif. -- a city with an even greater flood risk than New Orleans -- the idea of citizens gaining access to state evacuation maps is worrisome for local officials, who say people may feel a false sense of safety by having the maps -- which don't include all information relevant to a specific incident. Instead, officials say they will have that information and broadcast it to the public as events unfold.
Mapping the Routes
Getting the right information from government officials is what enables citizens to take personal responsibility in evacuation scenarios, said Kevin Wehr, assistant professor of sociology at California State University, Sacramento.
Wehr teaches environmental sociology -- the study of the interaction between society and the environment. He and his Sociology 238 class devoted a semester to studying what would happen if Sacramento suffered levee breaches and parts of the city flooded.
One group of students focused on obtaining an evacuation plan from the relevant government agencies, but received only conflicting information, Wehr said -- an experience that led to the publication of an essay titled The Runaround in an alternative weekly paper in mid-January 2006.
"We were trying to get the information that everybody in Sacramento should have," Wehr said. "We couldn't get it. It just wasn't there. As the title suggests, we got the runaround."
Although seemingly difficult to track down, Sacramento officials said the city does have an evacuation plan in place and is prepared for making sure large numbers of people can escape an area that floods. The evacuation maps are not made widely available because the escape routes in Sacramento will depend on the exact flood scenario, unlike areas with one evacuation route.
The city is flanked by the American and Sacramento rivers -- the downtown area is perilously close to their confluence -- and miles of high levees form the primary barrier between the rivers and Sacramento neighborhoods, many of which sit lower than the rivers themselves.
Downtown residents face a serious problem: Only a couple of routes lead out of downtown Sacramento, Wehr said, and he and his students grew concerned when they believed they couldn't get answers on what to do if those routes flooded.
"The questions that we were trying to get answered were: What would be the best route? What happens if Interstate 5 north is flooded? ... which is a strong possibility. What happens if Highway 99 is flooded? ... which is also a strong possibility. So everybody is going to go east? There are a lot of people out east. How exactly are we going to move the million or so people who would need to be moved? Those questions just aren't answered."
Wehr said it's difficult for the public to practice personal responsibility if government officials don't provide enough information on which to base their preparations for a disaster situation, though he did acknowledge that Sacramento leaders have started divulging more information on the city's evacuation plan.
"In subsequent community meetings," he said, "Mayor [Heather] Fargo was at pains to point out that [city officials] were not offering specific evacuation suggestions or routes because they couldn't possibly take into account all the different situations that could arise."
Wehr said city officials told him and his students that factors such as the location of a levee break or breaks, the amount water involved, the time of day of the break, and the possibility of road maintenance being performed on surface streets all would have an impact on traffic patterns in case of evacuation, which is why specific recommendations have not been made to the public.
"I'm sympathetic to that on a certain level," he said. "That makes sense. You want to suggest you have a plan for evacuation but that plan has to be fluid. Yet there's a difference in my mind, as a citizen, between a 'fluid' evacuation plan and a vague evacuation plan or no evacuation plan."
Information Paradox
The Sacramento Department of Utilities acts as floodplain manager for the city. The department created a Comprehensive Flood Management Plan in 1996, one component of which is an evacuation plan, said Dave Brent, engineering manager for the Sacramento Department of Utilities.
Brent said the department recently updated a series of maps in the comprehensive plan that model flood depths in susceptible parts of the city and the elapsed time to reach those depths. Those maps are available online, and at the offices of three city agencies, he said.
"The Comprehensive Flood Emergency Plan speaks to all the issues of floodplain management and living in a floodplain -- one of those issues being the emergency and rescue side of things -- but it also speaks to development standards, to securing hazardous materials, and public outreach," Brent said. "Last year, we embarked on updating the evacuation and rescue maps that are part of that plan. Those are really the maps that tie into the emergency operations side of things."
Information from state and federal agencies on water flows in the American and Sacramento rivers, and planned water releases from Folsom Dam, are used to gauge how deep floodwaters could get in case of a levee break and how quickly those depths would be attained, Brent said, forming the basis of the maps' suggested evacuation routes.
At first glance, the maps' availability online seems mundane. A public entity creates a series of maps that shows potential flood depths and puts them online for interested members of the public to view.
Yet much like the issue of personal responsibility, it's not that straightforward. The maps' availability online might cause more harm than good if flooding threatens Sacramento neighborhoods.
Brent said that although the maps present valuable and useful information, the department didn't originally plan to put them online, and doesn't track the numbers of hits and downloads.
"We were against putting them online for a number of reasons," Brent said. "But The Sacramento Bee did, and they were the first ones to do so." After the newspaper made the maps public, the city then posted them on its own site.
The maps are tools the department uses in its emergency operations center to work with police, fire, transportation, and the city's Joint Office of Emergency Services and Homeland Security in coordinating and orchestrating evacuations, he explained.
The concerns against the maps going online stemmed from very practical considerations, he said, primarily the fact that Sacramento is not like Galveston, Texas, or New Orleans, where evacuations tend to go one direction.
"We have to be very careful of where we send people, depending on what the levee-break or evacuation scenario is," he said. "We were always fairly concerned that people look at a map and say, 'Oh, I live here, and that means I do this.'"
The trouble with the public taking that approach to evacuation is that open evacuation routes will quite likely depend on unpredictable conditions, he said, and city officials are in the best position to have current information and broadcast it to the public via radio and TV.
Sacramento officials also said they're worried about people perhaps being lulled into a false sense of safety by having the maps.
"One of the things we really don't want people to do is print a map out, put it in their disaster kits with their route marked out and say, 'I know this route will be open so I'm going to take it,'" said Jerry Colivas, manager of Sacramento's Joint Office of Emergency Services and Homeland Security.
"It really doesn't say anything to the dynamics of a flood event," Colivas said. "It doesn't include things like a storm drain backing up that might partially flood a street. We know we have a lot of automobile accidents during flood events. Let's say a tanker truck turned over and jammed up an intersection. When we put that emergency message out, we're going to tell people the routes they need to take."
Staying Behind
Meetings are good, and maps are helpful. But what if people don't, or can't, evacuate?
In hurricane-prone areas, some people simply refuse to evacuate, said Jeanne Hurlbert, a sociologist at the Center for Public Health Impacts of Hurricanes in Louisiana State University's Hurricane Research Center, adding that for some of those people, a "hurricane culture" with a straightforward creed -- we don't evacuate -- is one reason.
Hurlbert and her colleagues performed a survey in New Orleans in 2003 to gauge whether people would stay in the city if a storm of Hurricane Andrew's strength were bearing down on the city.
She said that one in three people said they would stay, though she acknowledged the survey did not ask whether a mandatory evacuation order would change people's behavior -- because at the time, a mandatory evacuation had never been ordered.
"There are other people who were constrained from going," Hurlbert continued. "There are people who didn't leave because they didn't have the money to evacuate by themselves. Or they didn't have a car. Or they stayed with their pets. Or they stayed because there was an elderly relative next door, or there was a disabled family member. There are lots of reasons people stayed, and some of those reasons are very, very legitimate reasons."
In addition, she said, the survey found that of the approximately 180,000 households in New Orleans prior to Katrina, 41,000 residents didn't own automobiles. The question of who's responsible for helping those who stayed behind -- for whatever reason -- was at the center of many news stories covering Katrina and its aftereffects.
"I got asked so many times, 'Why didn't people go?'" Hurlbert recalled. "One journalist asked me a question on Tuesday or Wednesday [following Katrina's landfall] -- when people were drowning and dying of dehydration -- the guy said, 'I know that these people need some help, but what can they do to help themselves?'
"I really was not sure what anyone in New Orleans could have done at that point to help themselves, other than to swim faster," she said. "The question just really bugged me, and it's stayed with me since then."
It's not just in hurricane areas that people resist evacuating their homes.
Steve Lee, director of Emergency Management of Douglas County, Neb., home to Omaha, said some residents simply won't leave their homes in times of flooding.
Douglas County is bordered on the east by the Missouri River and on the west by the Platte River, while the Elkhorn River runs through the center of the county. Even so, Lee said, major flooding is not nearly as much of a concern as are the problems associated with urban flash flooding and rescue efforts for those who live along the banks of the rivers and creeks.
"People, generally, in those areas don't listen to evacuation orders to begin with," Lee said. "It's always a tough decision for the residents to leave and for the first responders to figure how to safely get in. Fortunately in our area, they're getting more and more serious about saying, 'Fine, if you want to sit on your roof, that's your business. But you better evacuate now because the danger will be too great to come in and get you three hours from now.'"
At such a point, where does the responsibility lie? If property owners ignore a mandatory evacuation order, they're putting themselves in jeopardy. Do they have a right to expect to be rescued? Conversely can homeowners be forced to evacuate? Should they be dragged off their porches, kicking and screaming, by emergency response personnel?
"Forcing evacuation is an iffy, gray area," Lee said, explaining that on one side of the argument is the premise that nobody can force a homeowner to leave his or her home, but on the other is the fact that by staying in their homes, people are creating a public safety hazard for first responders.
"We have to assign extra personnel to monitor the situation," he said. "They tie up equipment and manpower that could be better utilized. They become a public safety hazard themselves by choosing to remain."
As an example, he said, rescue personnel wouldn't simply wave goodbye if one of the homeowners was swept away by a raging creek.
"We'll make every effort to rescue them, which is an unfortunate and unnecessary risk for everyone," he said. "In our effort, we don't want to get to the point where it's that risky."
Everywhere Nightmare
It's likely the scenario in New Orleans could happen in any major city, given humans' natural tendency to procrastinate and the widespread "What? Me, worry?" syndrome.
In a poll released in late May 2006 by the American Red Cross, 60 percent of those surveyed said they've made no specific evacuation plan. When California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger spoke in San Francisco at an event reflecting on the 100-year anniversary of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, he reminded attendees of some sobering facts from California's Office of Emergency Services detailing state residents' plans to deal with an emergency and get their families out of a threatened city or area.
"Seventy percent of all Californians don't have a family disaster plan, and in this city, I was told the numbers are higher -- as high as 90 percent. Ninety percent of the people in San Francisco do not have a family disaster plan," Schwarzenegger said in his speech. "After all we have been through in this state and after all we have seen in New Orleans, I think that this is shocking."
If 90 percent of the residents of a city that's on a major fault line haven't prepared themselves for a citywide emergency, including potential ways to evacuate the city, does the city then, by default, assume full responsibility for getting those people out?
It's a question that's not easily answered. Even if every San Francisco resident prepared for a major emergency, how many of them don't have cars?
That's part of the allure of living in a major city -- public transportation and taxicabs often serve as the only method of transportation for many city residents. The same holds true for New York City.
At the very least, all a local government can do is prepare itself for a mass exodus.
Colivas said he is fine-tuning the operational aspects of evacuating certain Sacramento neighborhoods.
"Where would evacuation resources, people and equipment be staged and deployed?" he said. "How and when would personnel be notified? What about bus routes to pick up people who need transportation? Where would these folks be taken initially? What is the staffing need for various types of shelters? Where do we shelter animals? How do we coordinate with city schools?"
If a city's leaders make the right plans ahead of time, they will know the steps to take, and the best ways to communicate routes with constituents during a disaster scenario to get them out of a threatened area or neighborhood -- forcibly, if necessary.