Coda
Greg B Residents need more
info about evacuation
Two weeks ago, I wrote about the lack of an evacuation plan in Monmouth County and the state in case of emergency – at least a plan that anyone knows about.
And toward the end of that column, I said that even if such plans exist, crisis managers in the state have done the world’s worst job of getting the message out. I predicted that after the column, I’d hear from emergency planners telling me I was out in left field and that not only do the plans exist, they’ve been sitting on their desks for years.
I wasn’t expecting the first three calls I got regarding that column, all of them from local emergency management coordinators in Monmouth and Middlesex counties, telling me that not only was the column on target, the situation is much worse than I thought.
“The plan is that there is no @#%&*$# plan,” one of the more frustrated emergency management coordinators began. “And to tell you the truth, I don’t know when there will be a @#$%*%$ plan.”
He then went on to share a laundry list of complaints regarding the relative lack of support and leadership from county and state emergency management coordinators, and a longer list of specific concerns should an emergency – a bad hurricane, a chemical spill, a meltdown at a nuclear plant, a biological threat or a terrorist setting off a dirty bomb at the port facilities or New York City – require emergency evacuation of the state’s citizens.
There are school buses to transport the elderly, infirm and non-drivers, he said, but who would drive them?
There are shelters available, but no lists of those shelters have been made available to the public.
And although there are 76 little blue signs on various roadways in Monmouth County directing evacuation route traffic, even most emergency planners don’t know, or haven’t shared, alternate evacuation routes should the major roads on your average road map become impassable.
The next two emergency management coordinators echoed his concerns, and added several of their own. Will police and emergency service personnel from one community have the technological capability, even the right frequencies, to communicate with similar personnel in surrounding communities and with state and federal personnel? Where, specifically, do they start sending people if local shelters are deemed too dangerous? What are the priorities for local police, etc.? Is traffic the top priority? Is home and business protection a top priority? What do they do with all the people who would likely be arrested during, or immediately after, an evacuation emergency?
Too many questions, too few answers, they said. And to a man, they expressed the sentiment that the state should be doing more to create, and disseminate, a comprehensive emergency and evacuation plan, and more to share the details of that plan not only with county and local coordinators, but with the state’s citizens.
“If you’re in Red Bank and a toxic cloud is coming, if you have to try to find out about the evacuation plan on the way out the door, you’re too late,” one said. “We’ve got to do a better job before that happens. At one of the conferences we attended recently, one of the speakers said it’s not a question of if an emergency will occur in New Jersey, it’s a question of when. I think we all agree with that, and we’d like to see more progress, and better communication.”
The fourth call was from Neal Buccino, the public information officer for the New Jersey Office of Emergency Management, who started out complaining to my boss about my irresponsibility in writing the first column, but turned out to be a decent and helpful fellow once he calmed down.
As a public information officer, it’s Buccino’s job to put the best spin on the job his bosses – in this case the New Jersey State Police – are doing, so I don’t blame him for taking exception to my claim that they haven’t been doing much at all, at least much anyone knows about.
Our first conversation was a mite testy. Did I know about the emergency management collection available at www.njstatelib.org? Had I looked at the emergency and evacuation information at his office’s Web site, www.ready.nj.gov?
No, I hadn’t seen those sites, I told him because I didn’t know they existed. I also suggested that not many other people knew about them either. And even if all the information in the world is available on those Web sites, how would people get to them if the power is out?
Buccino suggested I look through the information and talk to him again later in the week, so that’s what I did.
And what I found at www.ready.nj.gov was a work in progress that might provide some help in an emergency, but not enough. The PDF files outlining evacuation routes, for example, are not as detailed as the cheap road maps you get at the service station, and are virtually unreadable. The links to pages detailing the response to several specific types of emergency, like chemical or hazmat emergencies, are “coming soon.” There are no detailed lists of shelters or emergency medical facilities.
Buccino agreed there are holes in the available material, but says efforts are under way not only to improve planning, but also to get the word out.
“We’re doing everything we can,” he said. “We’re looking for federal funding to do a statewide public awareness campaign, and should learn in a couple of months how much the federal government will provide. They’re working on making the evacuation map more user friendly, and by mid-May I plan to have much more detailed evacuation plans available online.”
“We’re also going to be sending out more press releases,” he continued. “We realize that a lot more does need to be done to advise people in New Jersey how to protect themselves in the event of an emergency, and we do have a number of projects we’ll be announcing soon aimed at getting the message out there about how families and businesses can prepare.”
For now, I’ll take him at his word, and when he’s ready, we at Greater Media Newspapers will help him put that message out.
Gregory Bean is executive editor of Greater Media Newspapers. You can reach him by e-mail at [email protected].