Planning for the unthinkable

   The lack of planning for disasters is just a part of human nature.  Don't plan and maybe the problem will go away.  When Trump says "who would have thought of this?" I yelled at the TV "You should have thought of it or just listened to experts that you ignore."
    I remember back in the early 1980's when FEMA had given Maryland's emergency planning agency a grant to develop a plan to respond to a nuclear attack.  The Maryland's plan was to be template for other states to use.  The primary goal was to determine how each County would evacuate its residents before the attack.  I know that sounds silly to think that you could develop a plan that would have enough time to implement and have people to follow it in a rational manner. But here was the assignment.  The President of the United States would order a national emergency and put in place an evacuation order to get as many citizens out of harms way before the attack.  As I remember it the plan supposed that there would be a 5 day warning to implement the plan.
      The person in Howard County Government responsible for emergency management headed up a local team of people from various sectors to determine the issues in having a mass evacuation of Howard County residents.  The plan was to do a staggered evacuation of our population out Route 70 to West Virginia.  Vulnerable populations first.  Schools would be responsible to evacuate school children on buses.  I can't imagine parents not running to their children's schools to get their kids but that was the plan.
      So why do I remember this?  I was involved with the development of a part of the plan for Howard County. I was the Planner for the Howard County Office on Aging and I was to find out the issues in evacuating senior citizens.  I remember meeting with managers at the local senior housing and the administrator of the one nursing home.  I learned that one of our senior housing buildings had handicapped units on the top floor because during construction they had underestimated the number of handicapped units needed and only had the top floor undone.  I was supposed to determine how many seniors didn't have cars or drive.  We had no real way to accurately determine this but I did add a question to a needs assessment that we did a couple of years later to determine how many transportation dependent seniors were in the County.
    While this exercise clearly showed that we could never develop a realistic plan for this situation it did make us aware of how we needed to plan for incidents of a more manageable scale.  One thing I remember being discussed was to have a plan that pulled together the different elements of County Government into a command center in case of a local disaster.  A few years later I was a part of this command center in the basement of the George Howard County Office Building during a 3 day winter snow storm.  Calls into the County storm hotline were directed to one of the 20 people in the Center.  The people answering the incoming calls would call out what the call was about and one of us would say we could handle the call.  I remember taking a number of calls from senior citizens who had run out of medicine.  Feldman's Pharmacy was a hero to many of the senior citizens in handling these needs.  If they couldn't drive the medicine to the person we had police drive the medicine to the person.
    Planning beats putting your head in the sand.  For our leaders not to realize how dependent we are on each other and plan for disaster in an organized manner is irresponsible. Am I thinking of anyone particularly?