Q: You had an enormous responsibility regarding evacuation.
RT: There was really only one responsibility that I had during this entire
episode, and that was whether or not to undertaken either a partial or complete
evacuation of the some 200,000 residents in the area. That responsibility was
a heavy one, indeed, for two reasons. One, if you're dealing in a normal
emergency situation, you've got a flood or a fire, you know, you can say,
"Well, the water's up to Third Street or Fourth Street and maybe we ought to
undertake an evacuation," or a fire may be sweeping through a district and you
would want to evacuate the adjacent district. With this kind of nuclear
emergency, there was no evidence. It was all kind of invisible. And it was
unknown. It was all out there and you had to rely on characterizations made by
experts, some of which we already learned were, at best, incomplete in their
characterization. The other thing is the problem of evacuations in and of
themselves. They're not without substantial risk. When you begin to move a
couple of hundred thousand people, and this is the experience I know of my
fellow governors that I talked to afterwards who had dealt with hurricanes and
tornadoes and floods and what-have-you, there are known risks. People --
aged, infirmed who have difficulty in normal times getting around are being
uprooted from their familiar surroundings and taken elsewhere. Even more
serious is the problem of people in hospitals, emergency rooms, babies in
incubators, and people who are on life support. It's not easy to move those
people and there is inevitably going to be some injury, some loss of life, and
these were known risks that result from an evacuation. So an evacuation is not
something, when it involves a massive group, a couple of hundred thousand
people, that you undertake lightly. And you want to be extremely cautious
about doing that and be sure the basis you have for it is correct. So this
whole question was constantly recycled throughout this entire period of time.
"Should we order an evacuation?"
Q: In your mind, what would be that moment or what would be that event that
you would say, "Okay. I know the risks, but I've gotta do it?"
RT: Because we mercifully never reached the point of having to seriously
consider an evacuation, I don't know that I could lay down any benchmarks that
would provide guidance for that. One of the things that we were insistent upon
having a best estimate for was what would be the lead time necessary. I mean,
what would be the interval of time between our being advised that the situation
had deteriorated to the point where an evacuation was necessary and when we
could undertake that evacuation. And that varied. The estimates were that for
an evacuation within a five-mile area, that time would maybe be two-and-a-half
hours, not much time. And I was concerned about the adequacy of our evacuation
plans. I mean these were plans that my administration had inherited. We had
not evaluated them. And one of the first things I did in trying to prepare us
for the eventuality of an evacuation was to ask one of my top people, Bob
Wilburn, who was Secretary of Budget and Administration, strangely enough --
not really in charge of emergency management, but he had been experienced in
the military and held a number of executive positions in the private sector.
And I said, "Give me a read on this. How would this evacuation work?"
His report, to me, on the evacuation plans was chilling, to say the least. One
of the things I'll never forget was that he said that under the regimen that
had been established by the counties on either side of the river, Dauphin
County where Harrisburg was, and Cumberland County, across the river, that
their evacuees would meet head-on in the middle of the bridge over which they
were to be evacuated. Now it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out
that that isn't really the way that you want to carry this out. So we set
about immediately doing repair work on the existing evacuation plans and I
think that by the time those changes had been made, we were prepared to meet
the challenge of an evacuation. Mercifully, we didn't have to.
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