What the leadership realizes and the average American and the press don't is that it is virtually impossible to effectively evacuate a major city. Always has been always will be.
You are absolutely correct. This concept being able to move millions of people out of an urban area in a very short span of time has always been on the same level as urban myth.
Wonder if they said this in Houston...and I must admit there is no way to enforce it...but here in Tampa Bay area, EOC and Jeb Bush stress, "If you are not in an evac zone, stay put."
Our city is coded, Evac A,B,C,D,E and a good part of the city is under no evac zone... they issue evac orders based on threat, and if it is a multi-county evac, the evacs are also staggered by county.
I'm in an E evac zone and have never been ordered to evacuate. If I was, our family (parents, sister and her family, everyone except hubby who has to stay behind due to work at EOC) would leave using back roads, taking the long way around Tampa Bay, avoiding the bridges and interstates, in order to make our way inland to a large family vacation home where we could all congregate and sit out the storm.
This mass evacuation on Interstates doesn't seem to work too well.
God forbid we get a WMD attack, or simultaneous attack. The resulting chaos will be beyond anyone's nightmares. There will be shootouts as gas stations. "The Road Warrior" will be a better guide than the FEMA Manual.
-virtually impossible to effectively evacuate a major city-
A very good point. Greater Houston area is 4 million, I think. The freeways become stop and go on a normal day at rush hours! One of the reasons I left was Houston trafic....
I agree with you. You CAN'T evacuate a major city w/o problems and it will take days and days to do it. It's no one's fault.
'Yup'! You got it. Gotta make some kind of plan to help yourself. In the big cities though, many if not most, will not make it through a mega disaster - fact of life.