6
Wednesdav.July 28.1993
UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Evacuation plan for nuclear crisis outdated
Continued from Page 1.
Today, it's 81,708. Both figures disregard KU students — about 27,000 people during the academic year
High-risk nuclear targets
with 60,000 more people, logistical problems would increase. Shelter and feeding needs would strap the host counties and try the patience of those compelled to be there.
Source: Crisis Relocation Plan
None of the plans in the host counties, which would provide the relief and the shelter and the hope for rebuilding life, has been updated for current populations.
Ron Moore, emergency preparedness coordinator for Allen County, said updating for bigger populations had not been considered.
"We've never even thought about that." Moore said "The plans probably aren't feasible for an increase in population in Douglas County."
Getting there, though, would be half the problem.
Additionally, all three host counties would receive evacuees from Johnson and Wyandotte counties, further compounding the problem.
Assuming each household — with an average of 2.63 people, according to the 1900 Census — drove one car to its relocation area, more than 25,000 vehicles would scramble to merge onto Iowa Street funneling into U.S. Highway 59 to travel south. That's an increase of about 9,000 vehicles more than the original 181 plan. And KU students are not included.
"If all those people are going down U.S. 59 at the same time, you've got a jam," said Joe Lee, professor of civil engineering at KU.
Lee explained that most American cities were designed to make it easier to enter than to leave
- "The streets get bigger the deeper you're in the city," Lee said. "Once you reverse that, once you go from wider roads to narrower roads, you will have problems."
And anyone who's traveled on U.S.
59 — an up-and-down, winding two-
lane road — knows what it's like to
get stuck behind a tractor or an 18 wheeler as it sputters up hills.
It's slow.
Now imagine those two lanes filled with slow-moving, congested vehicles, inching south at 30 mph, the speed the Crisis Relocation Plan says is feasible. Forget cars that overheat and stall. Forget the 17,000 cars — using 1980 figures — from Johnson County that merge onto U.S. 59 from I-35 as those people move to their relocation sites. Forget the panic inherent in an emergency situation.
It should be chaos.
And life would be different. Very dif- ferent
People would live in school gymnasiums or churches or large businesses. Food and water would most likely be rationed, and only two meals would be provided daily. No one could bring guns or alcohol or pets.
The only people who would be allowed to return to Lawrence would
be employees of essential organizations, like emergency and law enforcement organizations, water treatment facilities, the coroner's office and fire homes.
Phillips said the county government could enact extraordinary ordinances that would help it maintain control. Price caps could be established for goods and services, like gas or food. Private property would become public domain. If civil unrest threatened order, local governments could establish martial law.
"We can become a police state," she said. "We can make decisions that will make that happen."
Relocating south might remove people from ground zero. But Franklin, Anderson and Allen counties are in a "high fallout risk area." The choices seem limited: instant death or radiation sickness.
Robert McColl, a geography professor at KU, said the notion that relocating people to an area that is just as threatened by fallout is absurd.
And life like this would go on until the crisis passed. Or ignited.
"One of your main nuclear threats is southwest of Lawrence," McCollan said, referring to Wichita, home of McConnell Air Force Base and several major aircraft industries. "It's insane to make everybody run into the vapor of that."
But who's to say people would leave and relocate in the first place?
Some, especially KU students, might try to go home. Others might refuse to leave their homes, belongings and pets. And what's stopping a person assigned to relocation in Allen County from stopping in Ottawa, causing more strain on relief efforts there?
Jack Weller, an assistant professor of sociology at KU who has studied the effects of an evacuation order, although on a much smaller scale, said there was no way of predicting how people would react.
"If we can generalize what happens in natural disasters, it's generally a difficult process getting people to leave." Weller said. "It's hard for people, on the spur of the moment and on the basis of a public announcement, to leave all their possessions and go away."
One case in particular, Weller said, was 20 years ago when a natural gas leak in New York City threatened to engulf a neighborhood in a fireball.
"When they discovered the leak about four o'clock in the morning, police and fire units were sent into the area to wake people up and get them to leave," he said. "They had a hard time getting people to do that, even though the place was like a bomb and could go up at any moment. They had to resort to tactics like picking up people's children and carrying them away. I don't know if this can be related to what would happen for an evacuation order in a nuclear attack, but if it could be, then you would have to say it's a very hard decision for people
to follow even an official, authoritative evacuation order
---
C could the plan be better, then?
"It's presumptuous to extrapolate from what we know about people in natural disasters to a nuclear attack environment," Weller said. "I think even the best plan for an impossible situation is going to be questionable."
He also suggested that because civil defense had a deterrent role when the Soviet Union existed, planners have seen any plan, regardless of its effectiveness, as a way to prevent nuclear attack.
"It's absolutely part of deterrence," he said. "It's a way of saying we're prepared for you, take your best shot and let's see where it goes from there."
McCollagreed.
As for Phillips, she said problems were inherent in the plan but that it would be the best alternative for the amount of money the federal government had been willing to give civil defense.
"We're probably as prepared as any one else is for this type of scenario," she said.
"The Day After" came out when the Cold War was reigniting. It had cooled
during the years of detente in the 1970s. Then President Ronald Reagan, keeping his campaign promise to upgrade the nation's military, put the United States on the most intensive peacetime military expansion in history. The Soviets followed suit.
---
"In the early '80s we were just into the Reagan years to knock off the early part of ending the Cold War," said Rear Admiral John Hood, a 1962 KU graduate and assistant head of the Navy's ship defense program. "The perception and the reality then was
that there was a significant military threat from the Soviet Union."
But with the dissolution of the Sovi et Union two years ago, did that threat die along with it?
"Most people believe that the nuclear threat to this country is reduced, and I guess that I would subscribe to that." Hood said. "But not a single one of those warheads has been removed from service. The weapons the former Soviet Union possessed are still in existence. So in one sense you can say the threat is unchanged."
The end of one threat — the Soviet Union — does not signify an end to all threats. Certainly it does not indicate a more stable situation.
Instability runs rampant in the former republics of the Soviet Union. Weapons that would have been accounted for two years ago could have slipped across the border into the hands of Iran, Iraqor North Korea. What would happen if the Ukraine, which announced earlier this month, that it would keep 1,600 warheads on its territory indefinitely, suddenly turned belligerent?
"Any unstable country that possesses weapons of mass destruction is a danger." Hood said.
Instability breeds chaos, Chaos breeds danger
And the threat, although different remains.
---
$ S $ should the plans be changed? k there another alternative $ ^{n} $
The answer, like answers to most complex questions, seems to be plural.
But with a different world and a different time, should we worry about the threat like the one in "The Day After?" Should we worry about a radioactive cloud hovering over Lawrence? Should be worry about bodies stacked so high on the smooth, wooden court in Allen Field House?
Darewenot?
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