How to Evacuate a Major City

I would have posted this in September if I had my wits about me then. Perhaps you can think of this as a reflection on events formed immediately after Katrina. And it does seem incongruous to post this as Bush is having one of his worst weeks ever and there are so many other issues to discuss. But I can tell people in other cities are still thinking about evacuation issues, whether because of hurricanes, earthquakes, or terrorism. And I think there are some constitutional connections, especially to federalism, to some of the issues raised by the evacuation of New Orleans.

I’ll start with some distinctions. As I understand it, there are three types of evacuations: voluntary, mandatory, and forced. The difference between voluntary and mandatory evacuations is roughly the difference between a severe storm watch and a warning. A voluntary evacuation emphasizes that conditions are serious, but the authorities still expect to be able to deliver basic services once the storm hits. In a mandatory evacuation, authorities request everyone to leave and warn that basic services such as police, fire, and medical care will not be available after the storm. However, there is no legal penalty if you stay. Many Americans have wondered why everyone did not leave New Orleans before Katrina. Transportation and medical issues aside, there is no literal order to leave in a mandatory evacuation. If constitutional rights are not suspended (and I know of no mechanism to do so) no one can be forced to leave. I can only imagine what a forced evacuation of a major city would be like. A forced evacuation would have to involve tens of thousands of police and troops because otherwise you could never be sure everyone had left. And you would need powers of arrest if someone wanted to stay.

I’ve witnessed a number of evacuations of New Orleans since moving here in 1989. Especially after the threat of Hurricane Georges in 1998, it became evident that local and state authorities had not done the kind of comprehensive planning needed before New Orleans could be evacuated. Eventually, by working with Mississippi, authorities were able to devise the “contraflow” plan. The idea was to use all interstate lanes outbound in order to handle the crush of traffic. Contraflow received a good try during Hurricane Ivan in September 2004. In the opinion of most, it flunked. It took up to 11 hours to go the distance normally traveled in 1.5 hours. People became worried that they would still be on the road when the hurricane hit. These difficulties were reproduced in Houston just last month in the evacuation before Hurricane Rita. But the problems with contraflow were basically administrative and most of them were fixed before Katrina. The Katrina evacuation went better than Ivan.

As is now appreciated, all of this contraflow planning was occurring within a conceptual box that left out the tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of people in New Orleans who did not have cars, did not know where to go, and did not have enough money to afford a room when they got there. It’s puzzling to me that this failure is usually charged to local leaders. Moving everyone out of the city, even planning to move them would cost a lot of money and New Orleans city government has never had very much of that. In fact, it has long been known that city government was hamstrung in raising revenues by the state constitution. Even assuming the transportation issues could be solved, no one ever proposed a plan dealing with where to put these people. In any major evacuation, all the hotel and shelter room in Louisiana would already be full (which is why people without personal transport wound up in the Houston Astrodome).

So just as an observer interested in governance, two things were apparent to me before Katrina hit: (1) evacuating a major city was a state responsibility and (2) such an evacuation would raise regional issues and thus have to involve the national government. In addition, there was strong reason to think, even prior to Katrina, that evacuating a city is basically impossible. There are simply too many kinds of people with too many kinds of different problems. The experience of Ivan, in particular, pointed toward the need for “urban enclaves” such as the Superdome that would be shelters of last resort. With respect to the Superdome, the city government always made clear that it expected people to bring their own supplies, although it has been criticized for not having sufficient stocks on hand when they did not. I have never understood this criticism, for it again assumes that the city had so much money that it could afford to put millions of dollars worth of supplies in storage when it couldn’t afford to pay police a decent salary. New Orleans is a poor city in many ways and could not begin to afford the sort of transport or supplies required to take care of well over 100,000 people.

Despite these problems, made obvious by Hurricane Ivan, the state government did not assume any responsibility for transporting or housing the citizens of New Orleans. And here is where we reach our first federalism point. It tends to be assumed, as in the National Response Plan (check it out at the Department of Homeland Security) that any disaster should be handled at the lowest level of authority first. Pre-Katrina, responding to hurricanes is first the responsibility of local governments. To which the response should be: it all depends on the disaster. Again, pre-Katrina it was already apparent that hurricanes involved a regional response by interested governors at the very least. For example, one problem with contraflow in Ivan was that so many people were evacuating from Florida’s Gulf coast west into Louisiana that it hampered Louisiana’s own evacuation. Evacuations of this scope have to be planned and monitored at a national level. State and local authorities are capable of putting the plans into motion and supervising the process. But only a national authority can force states to cooperate to ensure citizens are protected.

Similarly, only national resources are sufficient to fund and supply the kind of urban enclaves needed to survive hurricanes and earthquakes. Any plan to cope with these events that assumes people will leave is a non-starter. As Katrina showed, even if you do have a car and don’t have medical issues, there are plenty of reasons not to leave. You may have relatives with these problems, of course. Or you may just want to protect your house and possessions from the breakdown in social order guaranteed by public officials who believe so firmly in the values of federalism that they overlook the fact that they don’t have the resources to preserve the basics of law and order. The Katrina experience showed that the officials who believe most firmly in the values of federalism, of valuing the local knowledge and capabilities of government were….officials in the executive branch of the national government! Local and state officials knew almost immediately that this crisis was beyond their means. I’m not suggesting FEMA and President Bush were entirely blind to the disaster. But constitutional values such as federalism slowed their reflexes. When state and local officials dialed 911, federal officials wanted to know exactly what they wanted, did they want the federal government to take over, how many troops, and on and on. All of these questions flowed from a legalistic concern with process, traceable ultimately to concerns about federalism.

If the constitutional value of federalism played a role in the disaster, are there any other values in the Constitution that might help us do better in the future? The one that’s occurred to me is the value of equal citizenship in the fourteenth amendment. Katrina has made me reflect more deeply on why the value of citizenship is important in inspiring and justifying federal action. I’ve already suggested as much in a previous post, so I’ll let the subject rest. But if you’re reading this as an undergraduate and you wind up in my conlaw class, just know that if I ever ask you the question implied by the title, the answer is: You can’t.