The Flight of Phoenix

It isn’t a very long list, just a scary one.
No. 1: Terrorist attack with chemical or biological weapons.
No. 2: Collapse of the enormous Roosevelt Dam, which would be “our Katrina.”
No. 3: Failure of the New Waddell Dam, which would “flat-out be bad” for the entire West Valley.

When emergency officials at the city, county and state level prepare for the worst, these are the biggies. And all of them evoke the Mother of Nightmares: evacuating the Valley of the Sun.

But just how do you get 3.7 million people out of town when a life or death situation looms? The bottom line is this: Officials simply don’t know.

“Frankly, I don’t think the infrastructure exists to get the whole population out,” says Warren Leek, the new director of emergency services for Maricopa County.

Or, as Arizona Homeland Security Director Frank Navarrete puts it, “I absolutely hope we never have to evacuate Phoenix.”

Leek says the state has a study that indicates it might be possible to get everyone out in 64 hours, but only if “everything goes off without a hitch.” Of course, you don’t have to be an emergency specialist to imagine millions of hitches, or to realize that a real disaster might not give the Valley anywhere near that kind of time.

In addition, such an optimistic timeline looks even more suspicious when you consider that two decades ago – when the Valley had only 25 percent of today’s population and only one freeway – officials thought it would take at least three days to empty the city.

Real life has a nasty way of interfering with timelines and projections: A chemical or biological attack would be instantaneous, with no warning, and Phoenicians would have, at best, a few hours’ head start if the dams broke. But, to emergency officials, reality also suggests that things aren’t as bad as they seem.

“I have a hard time coming up with a scenario that demands the evacuation of everyone in a short period of time,” Leek says. “There are scenarios where we’d have to evacuate parts of the population, but as far as evacuating the entire Valley, it would be very difficult.”

The way he sees it, a terrorist attack wouldn’t likely affect the entire Valley – only portions would have to be evacuated. But that’s in a calm, orderly world. Chances are, residents outside the immediately affected areas would be high-tailing it out of town, too.

As for those catastrophic floods, it’s a “scary but unlikely” scenario, Leek says. Or, as city of Phoenix Emergency Coordinator G. Marcus Aurelius puts it, “It is an extremely remote, low, low probability.” He takes comfort in that because if the unthinkable does happen, “it would be our Katrina,” he says. “It would be so catastrophic, life as we know it would be turned upside down.”

Surprisingly, however, a situation with the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Plant west of Phoenix isn’t on the list. “People have a lot of needless fear about nuclear plants,” Leek says. “People think they’re like Hiroshima, but it’s a controlled environment, and there is no way the pellets could explode. What could happen is a release of radioactive material, and that depends on how much the wind is blowing and how the wind is blowing.”

The county’s “worst-case scenario” for a radioactive release from Palo Verde is an immediate evacuation of everyone within 10 miles of the plant. Right now, 5,839 people in unincorporated areas live within those 10 miles, including three schools with more than 1,500 students. But that number is growing daily. There is also a 50-mile danger zone, where secondary effects are expected. That area includes parts of Phoenix and several West Valley communities.

Leek looks with concern at the explosive growth of the West Valley. “We don’t limit development around the plant, but buyers are notified,” he explains.

Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon says the “risk assessment” on Palo Verde doesn’t worry Phoenix much. “We’d be helping rescue people in other communities,” he says.

Although Palo Verde doesn’t make the Hit Parade of Horrors, the federal government demands a yearly emergency disaster exercise at the plant. Every year, state and county officials practice their responses to an imaginary release of deadly radioactive material. They simulate mobilizing emergency crews – police, fire, transportation officials, communication networks – and pretend they’re evacuating the population surrounding the plant.

Navarrete reports that last fall’s exercise, in which Governor Janet Napolitano personally participated, got an “A.”

The Valley of the Sun doesn’t need an ocean to face its own “Katrina” nightmare. The worst natural disaster would be the failure of Roosevelt Dam – the pride of Arizona’s water system, which has brought life to this desert since 1911. Like an enormous water pail, it would dump some 1.6 million acre-feet of water down a normally placid river system toward the fifth largest city in America. (An acre-foot is the equivalent of 43,560 cubic feet, or approximately 325,851 gallons.)

There’d be a “few hours” of advance warning, and in just over seven hours, a tsunami-like wave as high as eight stories would inundate parts of the East Valley. The flood would then continue on – averaging 30 feet to 60 feet deep – and cover most of Central Phoenix, be-fore moving on toward Yuma.

Downtown Phoenix – City Hall, Maricopa County headquarters, the Capital, the entire court system, all the major banks, Chase Field, US Airways Center – would be waterlogged. In fact, county officials have produced a map showing massive flooding up to Thomas Road from the Salt River bed.

As the Maricopa County Emergency Operations Plan notes, “Portions of Mesa, Tempe, Scottsdale, Chandler, Phoenix, Avondale, Good-year and Buckeye will be inundated.”

The other flooding nightmare would be the failure of the New Waddell Dam, which forms Lake Pleasant. “It would just flat-out be bad,” Leek says. The county plan says Sun City would have 90 minutes notice before being hit with a flood wave 59 feet tall. In all, it says, “portions of Peoria, Sun City, El Mirage, Glendale, Avondale, Phoenix, Luke Air Force Base, Litchfield Park, Goodyear, Tolleson, Buckeye, and the unincorporated areas of Maricopa County will be inundated by the flood.”

Officials note that there’s constant monitoring of the dams – plus a trusted stewardship by the Salt River Project – so it is not the “extremely remote” failure that keeps officials awake at night. Their nightmare is far more familiar. In fact, most officials witness it every night as they drive home.

It is impossible to evacuate in bumper-to-bumper traffic. All you have to do is get bogged down on I-17 headed north, or experience the clogged commutes on the Superstition Freeway to the East Valley, or the tie-ups on the I-10 toward Los Angeles to realize that.

Add in panic, and those clogged roads spell chaos. In addition, there’s the thousands of people who aren’t on the roads because they have no way of getting there – an estimated 7 percent of the Valley’s population has no access to a vehicle, and others are in hospitals, prisons, nursing homes and care centers. That adds up to almost 250,000 people. “There are far more people with special needs than people to help them,” Aurelius says.

And when you think about it, that 7 percent figure is probably low, because it assumes that every family is together in one place and has access to that car at the moment it needs to flee.

At 2 a.m., the Valley is an astonishingly different place than it is at 2 p.m. At 2 a.m., most families are home asleep, and the family car (or cars) is in the carport or garage. That includes the emergency officials who would have to rally if disaster struck.

At 2 p.m., however, chances are that nobody is home. Mom and dad are most likely at work – but, thankfully, so are emergency personnel. The kids are in their various schools. If there’s one family car, it’s probably in a parking lot somewhere, and just getting it back home could be a major problem. Double that if there are two family cars.

Assembling everyone at home would be the first challenge. Officials worry that few families have established a communications plan about how they would reconnect if separated in an emergency. Such a plan would be critical in a time of disaster. And the challenges just keep growing from there.

Leek suggests that residents consider their own streets, and asks if any of them know who’d need special help in an emergency. Is someone homebound? Is someone home sick? What if a neighbor’s kid is stranded? “I fear not reaching many people,” Leek says. “We need an education program to take care of neighbors, but the vast majority of neighborhoods here… people don’t know their neighbors.”

The concerns continue. Does the family have a disaster “go kit” that could be grabbed with the supplies needed to sustain them for a week? Is there gas in the car? Does anyone have any cash? It’s not hard to imagine how frantic those preparations could be.

And then there’s this: “Our fear is that if a family has three cars, people will want to drive all three rather than all go in one,” Leek says. “That will just clog the roads even more. Evacuation is going to take a tremendous amount of cooperation. If everyone puts their own interests first, everyone loses.”

Many of these images are new to people who have gone about their lives, never thinking about an ultimate disaster. But for the officials who make this their business, they’ve gone through all of these scenarios again and again. “We hope for the best and prepare for the worst,” says George Weisz, a senior assistant to Mayor Gordon.

So they practice – simulating a disaster and then mobilizing the major teams that would have to act on the public’s behalf. Of course, it’s been said that New Orleans officials had practice sessions, too, and America watched how that fell apart.

Officials here from every level – city, county and state – maintain that Arizona has developed a cooperative system that is probably unmatched in the country, and so the kinds of mistakes and blunders that compounded the disaster in New Orleans would not likely happen here.

“You do not want to be exchanging business cards the day of the disaster,” Navarrete recently told a joint House-Senate hearing on Arizona’s disaster preparations. “You want to be sure those communication lines are in place long before you need them.”

In fact, officials boast about how far the state has come in terms of getting ready for the catastrophe they all hope will never occur.

To know how far the Valley has come, it’s important to know where it was. Twenty-three years ago, in the midst of the Cold War, when nuclear attack was a national obsession, this writer asked many of the same questions being posed for this story. But the answers were incredibly different. Consider the evacuation story written in 1983:

They’re going to evacuate the entire city of Phoenix. By Zip Code.

If you laughed, don’t feel alone. A lot of people laugh when you tell them what civil defense people intend to do to minimize the “civilian casualties” of a nuclear war….

But nobody involved in civil defense work in Phoenix laughs at the idea of moving more than a million people out on one freeway….

Seriously, the actual civil defense plan of 1982 had everyone waiting patiently at their home zip code address until they were called to leave town. There wasn’t even a plan for the 85002 zip code, which happens to be Downtown, because nobody lived there back then – it was just the nucleus of the working population of Arizona.

If residents needed gas, they’d get a rationed amount, depending on where officials were telling them to go – north on I-17 to Prescott or Flagstaff, or east on the old highway to Globe (the Superstition Freeway wasn’t yet built). Back then, residents couldn’t go south or west because they’d be driving into more danger – both Tucson and Yuma were considered “prime targets” because of their missiles and military bases, and presumably would have been attacked, too.

Planners presumed that the evacuating population would get help from those who stayed on the job and ignored the needs of their own families – gas station attendants, police and firefighters. It presumed everyone would be kind and courteous, and nobody would panic. In fact, some county civil defense officials insisted that nobody would panic, as long as people knew just what to do.

What’s more, they were confident that within three days, they could empty the Valley of the Sun, but there was concern about what the “host communities” would do with the influx of people, and everyone admitted that that hadn’t yet been worked out. (Leek admits that even today, that is still a missing link in any evacuation plan – how could Prescott or Flagstaff take in the hordes of people from the Valley of the Sun?)

In addition to the get-out-of-town plan, civil defense officials also established a vast network of “fallout shelters” throughout the Valley. Although the water stored in those shelters had long ago gone bad, they were still filled with thousands of packages of sanitary napkins. Later, officials would find 50-gallon barrels of “carbohydrate supplements,” better know as gumdrops. For years, emergency services folks gave out handfuls of the gumdrops to visitors, being careful to weed out those colored with Red Dye No. 1, which had since been found to be toxic.

But the most disingenuous part of the entire plan was that civil defense officials secretly knew that the Valley itself was a prime target because of its military bases, which book-ended the area – Luke on the West, Williams on the East. If there really were a nuclear war, it would all be over for the Valley in seconds. Most of Phoenix would be evaporated in the first blast, while the rest of the Valley would be hit with enough immediate fallout to wipe out those areas as well – the fallout shelters would be nothing but crematoriums.
So, in the end, it probably didn’t matter that officials had a silly three-day plan to evacuate the Valley based on zip codes, because they knew it would all be over in a matter of seconds anyway.

Today, the news is more encouraging. If disaster strikes, one of the best places to be is Arizona. In fact, few places in the United States are as poised and prepared as Phoenix to meet a catastrophe head on.

For example, the state already has a “reverse 9-1-1” system – a phone network that automatically calls every land-based phone to alert residents of an impending disaster. (Lawmakers have told officials that they want to be sure cellphones are included in the system.) The county emergency plan also has a “call-out list” to be sure that places like schools, hospitals and nursing homes are notified. The media have been primed to help spread the word as well, and the Department of Transportation will use its freeway message boards to help inform the public of what might be coming.

The Phoenix Fire Department has created the Community Emergency Notification System, which will automatically call every home in targeted areas. And the fire department already has in place an “automatic aid” plan that allows firefighters from any of some 20 Valley cities to be dispatched by Phoenix. “We might be the only city that has this,” Leek notes. He says the Phoenix Police Department is working to develop a similar plan – currently, Phoenix PD has to call individual cities seeking help.

Among the strategies the county and state would use in evacuating the Valley are “mandatory carpooling,” where no car would be allowed on the road with less than two people. Officials also plan to use all lanes of the highways as outbound lanes – a plan in effect long before last summer, when the world saw an empty freeway headed out of New Orleans as drivers clogged the other side while trying to evacuate.

Knowing people will eventually run out of gas, the Department of Public Safety has 50 maintenance yards with fuel, and the National Guard has fuel trucks that could be sent out to help stranded drivers. Bus drivers taking people without their own transportation would be allowed to take their own families on the bus, while the families of police and firefighters who would be asked to remain at their posts would also get preference on outbound buses – a lesson underscored during last summer’s tragedies along the Gulf Coast.

The Red Cross is poised with makeshift shelters, and schools could be used for temporary housing.

“Arizona is really the model in the country – everyone acknowledges that,” Mayor Gordon stresses. “We’re all working together. Our Joint Task Force was the first in the country. We are not fighting over who’s in charge.”

Frank F. Navarrete does not even try to be diplomatic about how badly officials screwed up in New Orleans last summer, from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) all the way down to the local officials.

“I kept hearing people say, ‘Who’s in charge?'” he remembers, and that’s when he realized everyone was in a world of hurt.

“It is inconceivable to me not to be pre-positioned [with needed supplies, as FEMA failed to do]. They knew the hurricane was coming. You need water, food… you have to have things in place. We do it for forest fires – we are ready. If I was as unprepared as they were, I wouldn’t wait to be fired, I’d quit.”

And then he gives a guarantee: “I guarantee that wouldn’t happen here – not just because of me, but we have done so much training, we have had so many exercises, we’ll be ready.” He stresses that planning is continuous. “We have emergency managers in each county, and we meet quarterly – we sit down and brainstorm. I tell them, ‘Give me the unthinkable, and how we can screw up.'”

The state has identified 400 possible “threats” to the safety of Arizona – for obvious reasons, they speak only in generalities – that include attacks on water, utilities, fuel tank farms and chemical plants. Emergency plans focus on how to “harden” those facilities against attack, and how to get the public out of harm’s way.

While he agrees it’s “unlikely” the entire Valley would have to be evacuated, he can easily see an influx of refugees from elsewhere. “Ingress is the problem,” Navarrete says. “We’re the natural place for people from California to come after a major earthquake. What do you do with all the people? We have four major highways coming in from California.” A “mass influx plan” is being developed.

The disruption of life in California also would create other problems for Arizona. California is a major supplier of food and medicine for the Valley – if there’s an earthquake, those supplies will be disrupted. How long could the Valley survive on its own? Officials admit they don’t know what the food and water supply is like, but they’ve told lawmakers that hospitals normally have only a three-day supply of medicine. (There’s also a major concern that citizens don’t have stockpiles of the medicines they need to stay alive, in part because most insurance companies refuse to cover more than month-to-month prescriptions.)

To date, Arizona has already had some real-life experiences with mass evacuations and influxes. Navarrete notes that Arizona evacuated 90,000 people in northeastern Arizona during the Rodeo-Chediski fire. In another case, it evacuated a dense two-square-mile area threatened by a chlorine leak. In addition, it hosted nearly 500 New Orleans refugees who camped out at the Coliseum. That effort, which was praised nationally, brought together 81 city, county, state and federal agencies in the Coliseum to handle the needs of people who’d just lost everything. “Within two days, we had every conceivable resource at the Coliseum, including getting people driver’s licenses,” Navarrete says. “It tested our mettle.”

Currently, Arizona has “mutual aid” agreements with California, Texas and New Mexico, and Navarrete says Nevada, Utah and Color-ado want to join Arizona in a four-state pack. He notes that Arizona also has a “joint emergency management plan” with the state of Sonora, Mexico.

But no matter how much planning goes into a potential disaster, the wild card will always be how the public responds. “Public panic is a free-for-all, and that’s a concern,” Navarrete says.

Or, as Leek puts it: “The message will be ‘your cooperation is urgently needed,’ but if everyone scatters, it’s going to be a tremendous problem.”

Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon remembers being shocked at the magnitude of the Katrina disaster as he flew into New Orleans last summer. He arrived on a jet donated by Mesa Air-lines to bring home 80 exhausted Phoenix firefighters, four marshals and four rescue dogs that had been on the ground there, searching for survivors, for more than two weeks.

Like everyone in America, the mayor had been monitoring the horrible story, but television hadn’t done it justice. “TV did not show the scope of how it was all connected,” he remembers. “We kept flying and flying and flying, and it looked like the forest fires we see here, but clean – there were not the blackened remains, but everything was gone.”

He came away from that experience with a new understanding. “Seeing it firsthand, it really did tell me that none of us are prepared for disasters, whether manmade or natural,” he says. “All emergencies are local. Waiting for the county or the state or the feds is a fool’s game – we have to respond as if there won’t be any help. We need to be the first responders.”

When he got home, one of the first things he did was call the mayor of Los Angeles – a call from the leader of the fifth largest city in the country to the second largest – to suggest a “mutual aid agreement.” The two cities are now working together.

“We are 400 miles apart, and we need to be prepared, both for evacuation and hosting [the other’s evacuees],” he says. “Our police and fire departments will be training together, and we’re putting into effect our own evacuation plans.” He stresses that the city’s plan will mesh with what the state and county are developing.

Last year, Phoenix got about $10 million in national Homeland Security money to put its plans into effect. Recent news stories report that Phoenix may be cut from the list for more funding after 2006, because it doesn’t face the same level of risk as other major American cities. Emergency coordinator Aurelius acknowledges that Phoenix looks safer than a lot of other cities, but says talks with the feds are continuing, and nothing is set in stone.

What’s more, the city has hired Dennis Compton, a former Phoenix police official who is a recognized national expert on disasters. For months, 20 departments of the city have met for four hours every week to detail emergency plans and strategies.

“We are, individually as a city, much better prepared, much more aware,” Mayor Gordon stresses. Nevertheless, when he thinks about a disaster hitting Phoenix, he keeps seeing those eerie scenes of New Orleans in the back of his mind.