Wednesday, June 30, 2010

What is the evacuation plan?

Nobody knows.  That's pretty scary.  In the event of a "signifcant" tropical storm +, what is the game plan for the city, and Gulf Coast region in general?

I guess what I'm asking is hurricane + oil = ????

There are rumors flying around on the internet, which need to be either dispelled or confirmed.  I don't see our city, state, or federal entities coming to the forefront to let us know what the plan is.

Joel Achenbach, from the Washington Post, was kind enough to reply to me in response to the article he recently posted in which financial anaylst and oil "insider", Matt Simmons, claimed the entire Gulf Coast will be evacuated.  Achenbach pointed out the subtle snark he made towards Simmons, referring to him as "a font of apocalyptic predictions".  He stressed that readers would be able to discern that Simmons was making an egregious claim.

Unfortunately that quote made it around to numerous conspiracy sites and the notion of a mandatory Gulf Coast evacuation seems to be very real in lots of folks' minds.

After pointing that out to Achenbach, he seemed to appreciate the need for us, the people along the Gulf Coast, to get answers from those who will decide our fate in the event of a tropical storm. I am hoping that the WaPo will find answers for us soon from DHS, and the state entities who are responsible for evacuation procedures.

4 comments:

bruthaman1 said...

logisticly i really don't see a scenario where you could evacuate the entire gulf. from east to west your talking about florida to texas. but how far north would you have to evacuate? i would assume that the reasoning for the entire gulf to be evacuated would be the storm picking up the oil and dispersing it over land. when i lived in atlanta we would catch the tail end of storms that came from the gulf. how far would the oil travel with the storm? would atlanta have to be evacuated? really it sounds like you would have to evacuate the whole S.E. part of the country which just wouldn't work.

Anonymous said...

Couldn't sleep so I was listening to "Coast-to-Coast AM" last night and they had some remote viewer who said the coast will have to be deserted.

And some conspiracy.... something... I took mental notes to post to you since I know you love this kinda stuff... but I took a sleeping pill and now I can't remember too much. -or do I?

http://www.coasttocoastam.com/show/2010/06/29
I
Also, he can teach you how to "RV".

kw said...

http://xkcd.com/748/

Worst Case Scenario

Mark Folse said...

As I said in an earlier post, historic salt water kills of vegetation would be a good indicator of how far from the coast you would need to get. Most of the volatile parts of the oil or Corexit would have evaporated before you have to worry too much about toxic rain, I think.