How would we fare in Seattle?

In Plans to Evacuate U.S. Cities, Chance for Havoc.

Seattle is isolated by the waters of Puget Sound to the west and the Cascade Mountains to the east. Across the mountains -- and I am talking about the entire Puget Sound lowland from Olympia to Bellingham, a distance of 150 miles -- there are only two all-weather passes: Stevens and Snoqualmie. Both passes are closed at least once each winter because of rockfalls and avalanches (The other passes -- Chinook, Cayuse, Washington -- are completely closed by snow mid-October to April.)

The only escape routes which do not funnel through mountain passes are north to Canada and south to Oregon along the I-5 corridor.

I suspect that -- except in cases of nuclear or biological terrorism -- the wisest thing to do is nothing. Be prepared to stay at home and then stay there.

Comments

[DaveL]

But how far would you really need to go? It's hard to imagine a threat that would require evacuation of the whole Puget Sound area. You could have an earthquake or an attack big enough to do major damage to one city, but the problem you'd be left with would have at least as much to do with getting help in as getting people out.

[Kent]

DaveL is probably right. Hurricanes are really the only natural type of event I can think of that generate mass advance evacuations. Other than hurricanes, it's really only human-caused events like war that generate such widespread evacuations from a large area. I suppose if it was 1946 and the Soviet Red Army had 20 divisions driving down from Canada there would be mass hysteria and evacuation. But other than that, I dont' see it unless there is some sort of regional bio-hazard that creates mass panic like a radioactive dirty bomb that is spreading in the wind.

That said, Puget Sound would be absolutely screwed and if Seattle attempted something like what Houston did it would have been a much larger clusterfuck. I'm currently living in Waco, TX which is about 2.5 hours NW of Houston in light traffic. I drive down there from time to time on business and there are dozens of routes into that city and a huge network of rural and farm roads in the surrounding countryside. Most of these roads were still pretty open if people had known to get off the freeway. The problem is that most of these folks don't know how to get anywhere that isn't on a freeway and many of the smallest roads around here aren't even on the paper state-wide maps you buy at gas stations because Texas is such a big state. So people didn't even know how to find alternative routes.

Compared to Houston, Seattle has fewer freeways and the freeways that do exist are smaller. And outside the urbanized zones, there are far fewer alternative rural roads because of the geography. Once you hit the mountains there are few options. Finally, once you get out of the urban areas, Seattle has far fewer services like gas stations and stores. So the food and fuel would get sucked dry almost immediately. Houston is surrounded by small towns and cities in every direction for as far as you can drive so there is always a next exit with a cluster of stores and gas stations and groceries. Not so if you head east from Seattle on almost any highway.

What's the lesson I took home from watching the Houston fiasco? Get a GPS unit for your car with street-level routing capability. For those without GPS built into their car you can get the Garmin Streetpilots or build your own navigation system using a PDA and GPS antenna. I use an old Dell Axim X5 PDA which I have installed in my car with an auto-mount and I have a GPS antenna connected to it. I run a software package called mapopolis and it will provide me with street-level maps for all of North America and will route me anywhere and auto-detour around any features I tell it to detour around. Total cost not including the PDA was $190 for the GPS antenna and software. Now I can drive back roads, even gravel back roads across this entire state if I want and never get lost.

[A Krom]

Not that I think evacuating by car would do much good in most circumstances, but a more failsafe system than a GPS and computer would be a DeLorme state atlas or equivalent.

Delorme publishes state atlases that they call Gazetteers -- the source data for these is USGS quads, and the maps show all the little roads that a standard road map lacks. While the scale is wrong for urban navigation, if you want to find a parallel county or local route, this is your best bet.

One qualifer -- some roads are not erally usable. Once I trusted by Washington State Atlas and Gazetteer to get me down from the Cascades via Stampede Pass (or near to it) on Forest Service roads. What the map didn't tell me was that Seattle has locks on the roads leading into the watersheds. We drove into the mountains for at least an hour on one-lane dirt roads only to encounter a locked gate with about fifty padlocks on its chain. Obviously, most people surmount the obstacle with a bolt cutters but we thought it more prudent to make the long drive back to I-5.