New York City's hurricane evacuation plan

BREITBART.COM - Just The News:

"It's coming, with skyscraper-rattling winds and a 30-foot storm surge that threatens to submerge Wall Street, flood the subways and turn Coney Island into a water park. And when it arrives, more than 3 million New Yorkers _ more than six times the population of New Orleans _ could be forced to evacuate by the first major hurricane to hit the city since 1938."

My loyal reader (or are there two of you?) will note that I recently (26 September) discussed at length some problems with evacuating New York City. This AP story gives a few further details.

First, in response to a category four hurricane, the city plans to evacuate only 3.3 million persons and to shelter an additional 800,000 displaced persons within the city. This is substantially fewer than I was estimating, but that is the end of the good news.

The bad news includes an evacuation rate of 18 hours per million persons. That looks like 59.4 hours to me. But, as I wrote earlier, there is also the problem of Long Island. Taking a low figure of about 2.5 million persons in Nassau and Suffolk, evacuating just 40% of that population adds another million evacuees and another 18 hours. Now, we are looking at a 78-hour evacuation plan, or more.

A category four hurricane moving at over 30 miles per hour and having hurricane force winds and heavy rains out more than 100 miles from the eye means completing the evacuation probably four hours before landfall as traffic conditions will not be safe, especially on very exposed places. You want an E-ticket ride? Try crossing the Verazzano Narrows Bridge, the second longest suspension bridge in the world (4,260 feet) with its roadbed over 200 feet above the water, in a gale with driving rain.

I think we are now 82 hours from landfall of the eye of the hurricane as the point where the evacuation must begin. To put that in better perspective, Katrina hit N.O. about 8 AM on a Monday; 82 hours prior would have been 10 PM on Thursday. But, a storm moving 30 miles an hour would be over 2,500 miles away when the evacuation order is issued - but that is impossible. Typically, storms travel more slowly in the tropics, so lets take an average speed of 10 mph on its way to NYC - that still means the evacuation order must go out when the storm is over 700 miles away.

This brings us to a point noted in another recent post here. How confident will people be in our government's forecast of the time and place where the storm will hit? (I linked to a story on this topic on 28 September.) Add to this the point that a recent poll (see the linked story above) shows about two thirds of New Yorkers don't believe their own neighborhood can be evacuated.

As I said before, I'd hate to see this plan collide with reality.