Today I witnessed one of the more depressing public hearings I have ever attended. The topic was huge: Emergency preparedness, particularly in the Northern New Jersey region. One of the main issues: what happens in the event that New York City has to be evacuated? What are the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the state and local authorities going to do when New York City (2005 population estimate=19,254,630 people, acc. to US Census Bureau) find themselves in a situation where the Big Apple has to be evacuated?
For a sense of scale, that means that about 6.5 percent of the entire population of the US would have to move out smartly on short notice (more below the fold).
Call it 7 out of every 100 people, for the sake of argument. If a calamity arose, the odds are that most people from the Big Apple would try to escape to the west of New York City, probably heading out towards Pennsylvania, where things are more rural. Actually, there are quite a few people that live in Pennsylvania, and commute to New York City, and northern New Jersey. But chances are that they don't have room for 19.3 million of their closest friends.
The hearing was held by the House Homeland Security sub-Committee on Emergency Preparedness and Science and Technology. In the interests of full disclosure, my Congressman, Bill Pascrell, Jr. (D., 8th District, NJ) was one of three calling the hearing. The other two were Republicans, one from Pennsylvania's Lehigh Valley, the other a former Police officer turned congressman from the state of Washington, who was familiar with issues on the West Coast, including Seattle.
It was kind of a revelation to see how the Republicans worked. They were basically nice guys, to all appearances. And in the beginning, they all agreed that they had been working in a bipartisan spirit, working for the benefit of all Americans.
It is only if you had done a minimal amount of background work for the issue that you began to realize the enormity of the Republican callousness towards New York City and, by extension, to New Jersey and even Pennsylvania--and so soon after the plane crashes into the former Twin Towers on 9-11-2001.
Quite simply, the two Republican Congressmen showed little awareness of the scale of the problems in New York City--this after their party has been making political hay on the backs of the Twin Towers victims and survivors for five years now. New York media viewers are quite aware of the budget-screwing they are getting under the latest FEMA budget--so much so that normally quiet NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg felt obligated to squak loudly in the press about the skewed funding formula.
I have no idea how the hearing will be played in the press in tommorrow's coverage. But ordinary New Yorkers and their neighboring states should be quite concerned over the big disconnect between the various reports on the state of actual preparedness for evacuating New York City, should it be necessary.
First, a thumbnail background. NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg has said the Big Apple is ready to handle a category 3 hurricane (New York Newsday, 9-23-2005). That means about 350,000 people evacuated from low lying areas. However, the New York State Assembly's guru on the subject of evacuation, named Brodsky (D, Westchester) comes up with a much worse estimate--that a Cat 3 hurricane would cause 2.5 million to evacuate, forcing one million to seek refuge in public shelters. And that's just for hurricanes. Imagine the difficulty in the event of a full-scale evacuation.
The NYC evacuation plan is supposed to be a two-part affair. The public would be expected to go to one of 23 major information/reception centers, and then be directed
to one of 151 designated public shelters.
Brodsky's NY State Assembly did a study of NYC's evacuation plan, and found lots of holes. The important point for today's dispatch is that the House Committee did not allude to very many of them, which should concern residents a lot.
You can find a litany of these problems cited in therealestateobserver.com. For clarity, here are a few:
*NYC's evacuation plan doesn't say how long it would take to evacuate.
*Nor does it show the effects of traffic congestion--since the city ran out of money to complete this study. (One tidbit: in an evacuation, police escorts would be assigned to gasoline trucks--as some people are assumed to run out of gas on the highways on the way to Pennsylvania).
* Brodsky's report expresses concern that certain populations would be left pretty much behind--nursing home residents, handicapped, some hospital patients.
On the plus side for today's hearing, at least that issue was addressed before the House panel, but it amounted to a bland assertion that these "special populations" are expected to be given evacuation notices earlier--at least in the event of a hurricane. Which of course begs the question of what happens if, say, something big does occur at the Indian Point nuclear plant. Logical conclusion: every man for himself.
Here's a quick breakdown of the NYC population. You can draw some conclusions at to what might happen in the event of a big emergency.
* Kids: 6.5 percent under 5, 23.8 percent under 18.
* Old people. 13 percent over the age of 65.
* Handicapped/disabilities: 3 million people, or about 15.6 percent of the city's residents.
* Language barriers: about 121 different languages spoken. About 6.5 percent are of Asian ancestry.
And about 17.5 percent of NYC's population is black.
Congressman Pascrell was assertive in criticising Michael Chertoff's distinction on risk management on parts of the emergency preparedness plans for the US, which carries over unfavorably toward NYC, and skews the formula against the city. But what was not clear to me before the hearing is that this is not just another "Ford to NYC: Drop Dead" moment. The Repub Congress has been in power for 5 years, and the plans to handle 19.2 million people driving, running, walking, swimming, rowing, bicycling (and maybe even wheelchairing) past my neighborhood towards Pennsylvania--still needs a ton of work. It did not boost my confidence to hear my county sheriff say that he still can't talk with the fire chief of the biggest cities in the region, because the radios don't communicate properly with one another. Which is an issue for the Federal Communications Commission to get into gear over.
Even though I saw the Twin Towers burning, laying a mournful colum of smoke for the longest time across the same skyline that George Washington used to recon New York City from, during the Revolutionary War, it was not until today that I realized how little the Repubs in Washington DC were doing to fix some future problems, and at least mitigate them. It remains a scandal, compounded by the corruption of Tom DeLay, Abramoff, etc. These wonderful folks who brought you the mismanagement of Hurricane Katrina aren't through with their program of devastating their own neighbors in the US. Their mismanagement is much more evil than I anticipated. The elections of 2006 are quite important. For those in NJ, it is vital that Robert Menendez be elected Senator, to replace the seat left vacant by Jon Corzine. It is actually a matter of self-preservation.