Nearly five years after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and a year after Hurricane Katrina left thousands of people stranded in massive flooding, emergency officials in the Washington area have not identified the people they would need to move to safety in a mass evacuation.
The region doesn’t have a registry of people who would need assistance, but about 35 percent of the District’s households do not have access to a vehicle, said Natalie Jones Best, emergency preparedness and risk manager for the Department of Transportation.
The District has never had a mass evacuation, Best said. In the Sept. 11 attacks, “it was more like self-evacuation, with crowds flooding the streets like water takes a path of the least resistance.”
Mimi Castaldi, director of AARP D.C., brought area agencies together after watching events unfold during Hurricanes Katrina and Rita last year.
“There are a lot of different plans out there, and the challenge is, how do you get them all together?” Castaldi said. “[The government] has recognized that, but have we found all the answers? I don’t think so.”
But Randall Larson, director of The Institute for Homeland Security, said there wouldn’t be a need to evacuate the city unless a large hurricane came up the coast.
A nuclear attack would wipe out the District and a chemical attack would be too small to warrant evacuating the entire city, said Larson, former chairman of the Department of Military Strategy at the National War College. Spending for a plan diverts money that could be directed toward prevent an attack, he said.
“Homeland security has become the ultimate pork project,” he said. “It’s ready, shoot, aim. This kind of spending is making us less safe, not more safe.”
The region’s request for $4 million to design a plan to transport evacuees was shot down with last week’s 40 percent cuts in federal homeland security grants.
At a glance
» In the National Capital Region’s grant request, $2 million was to coordinate and train government, nonprofits and businesses; $500,000 was to identify those who would need help, including prisoners and students; and $1.5 million was to coordinate evacuation roles and shelter resources.
