Is NYC Ready for a Hurricane Evacuation?

The New York Post suggests that the answer is no. New York City faces some of the same problems that New Orleans does - limited access to the mainland, many low lying areas that could be flooded during a storm surge, and an infrastructure (subways, tunnels) that could be severely impacted in a storm.

Even though the last major hurricane to hit the metro area was in 1938, experts say that New York could definitely be hit by a Katrina-sized hurricane.

If such a storm ever approached, officials here would ask people to leave their cars at home and use mass transit to get to one of 23 reception and distribution centers.

They would then be taken to one of several hundred evacuation shelters.

The idea is to avoid bottlenecking along roads, bridges and tunnels, as happened as Katrina bore down on the Gulf Coast. But there's a big problem — many people, including the sick and elderly, would have to travel miles to get to a bus stop to catch a ride to the reception centers, according to the state Assembly committee report.

The city's Office of Emergency Management says it is ready to handle a hurricane evacuation. But the 18-page report says that the OEM does not have enough evacuation shelters to handle a severe hurricane.

In the event of a killer Category 4 hurricane like Katrina, OEM is prepared to handle 1 million evacuees and shelter 224,000, according to agency documents obtained by the Assembly committee.

However, this conflicts with an Army Corps of Engineers study that found a less powerful Category 3 hurricane could cause the evacuation of 2.5 million residents and require shelter for 600,000 to 1 million people.

An inaccurate estimation of evacuees would dramatically strain transportation systems, shelter space, and other services for stranded residents, the report says.

Other findings include:

* 75 percent of New Yorkers have no idea where the closest shelters are.

* City bus drivers might be responsible for transporting people to evacuation shelters, but the Metropolitan Transportation Authority has failed to detail these responsibilities to the drivers.

* Although the city urges residents to use mass transit during evacuations, it's unclear whether the city, MTA and Port Authority have the assets to handle the millions of people affected.

* The city has done a poor job educating people on what to do during a natural disaster.

"If we don't view Katrina as a wake-up call in New York City and the surrounding areas, then we are fooling ourselves," said the report's author, Richard Brodsky (D-Westchester), chairman of the Assembly's Committee on Corporations, Authorities and Commissions.

People would be discouraged from driving since there are only a few routes out of New York City (the SI bridges to New Jersey, Lincoln and Holland Tunnels, GWB, Henry Hudson, Triboro, Whitestone, and Throgs Neck bridges) and these routes would be quickly overwhelmed by car traffic. And that doesn't appear to count the need to evacuate people from Long Island who would have to travel through New York City to reach higher ground.

The City has to do better than this. Considering that NYC is regularly visited by Nor'easters and occasionally by hurricanes, the plans outlined above would appear to be inadequate.

However, I do believe that the NYPD and emergency services would not crumble and disintigrate as they did in New Orleans. We've seen what the emergency services can do in NYC under the most unimaginable situations (9/11), and know that we can count on them to do the best. It's the emergency planners that I worry about as their assumptions appear inadequate to the task.