NYC to add 640K people to evacuation zones

NEW YORK (AP) — Hurricane evacuation areas would encompass 640,000 more city residents and the number of zones would double so officials could tailor evacuation orders better to the dynamics of a particular storm, under plans disclosed Friday.

Details on the new zones won't be released until June, but the changes could mean neighborhoods around the city might newly be told to clear out ahead of future storms, even as the city grapples with findings that nearly two-thirds of people shrugged off orders to leave before Superstorm Sandy.

As officials reckon with a new understanding of flooding risks after Sandy, the idea in expanding both the size and number of zones is this: "Only dislocate the people who need to be dislocated and ultimately give people more confidence" that evacuation is necessary, Deputy Mayor Caswell Holloway said at a briefing to release the city's self-analysis of its handling of Sandy.

More than 2.3 million people live in the city's three evacuation zones now. The roughly 375,000 residents of the most vulnerable area, called Zone A, were ordered to leave a day before Sandy walloped New York on Oct. 29.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg gave several televised briefings urging them to go, and the city sent out text-message alerts and dispatched police cars with bullhorns to some neighborhoods.

And yet a city-commissioned survey of 509 Zone A residents found 63 percent stayed home, according to the report released Friday.

Nearly three-quarters of them said they'd gotten the message that they were supposed to leave. But they didn't, for a range of reasons, mainly that they thought the storm wasn't strong enough to imperil them or that their homes could withstand it. Some said they wanted to protect their property from damage or looters, or they didn't think the storm would hit.

The choice proved fateful for some New Yorkers. Sandy killed 43 people in the city, almost all of them in Zone A. Thousands of homes were destroyed or damaged, and an estimated 1 million residents lost power citywide.

Getting people to heed evacuation orders has bedeviled officials around the country for years. Often, one-third to half of residents defy mandatory evacuation orders, experts say.

Some governments have tried dire warnings about the dangers of staying behind, moral appeals not to endanger rescuers and laws that threaten fines or jail time. In New York — where a little more than half the survey respondents said they thought the city could have done more to encourage evacuation — Friday's report calls for seeking to use digital billboards and making sure orders emphasize what's at stake.

"People need to believe, first of all, what you're telling them: that the situation is serious. ... But people need to believe, also, that if they leave, there's somewhere for them to go that's safe and what they leave behind will be safe. And we're going to continue to push those messages," Holloway said.

But some New Yorkers may not be disposed to listen, even after Sandy.

Robert Keith was sitting on the stairs inside his home in Broad Channel, an island near the Rockaway Peninsula in Queens, as Sandy's surge pushed in his door. He scooted up the steps as the water set his pool table afloat and climbed to about 5 feet. For days afterward, he slept in his car and showered at a volunteer fire department headquarters.

And yet, should another storm come, he'd stay again.

"I would say, mentally, 'Well, what the heck? I survived Sandy. How bad can this one be?'" he said by phone Friday.

The current evacuation zones are based mainly on storm surge risk projections, neighborhood geography and how accessible an area is by bridges and roads. The new zones come as federal flood map revisions are poised to double the number of homes and businesses in flood zones, and the evacuation maps also will take account of such factors as the direction in which a storm is traveling.

Beyond improving evacuation messages, the report makes dozens of other recommendations, such as buying more police boats, developing a system to track patients after hospital evacuations and lining up more generators and boilers. Other suggestions include getting more fuel trucks, deploying city staffers faster to work with community groups on relief operations and working with companies to extend cellphone towers' backup power.

Many recommendations involve crafting how-to plans for such needs as distributing food and water and checking on homebound people — things the city did after Sandy, amid some criticism about not moving fast enough.

By making ready-to-go plans now, officials won't "have to think in an ad-hoc way and respond to those things," Deputy Mayor Linda Gibbs said.

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Via Yahoo News!

Five U.S. nuclear reactors in earthquake zones

By Mark Ralston, AFP/Getty Images

Aerial view of the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant which sits on the edge of the Pacific Ocean at Avila Beach in San Luis Obispo County, California, is an at-risk reactor like those in Japan.

EnlargeCloseBy Mark Ralston, AFP/Getty Images

Aerial view of the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant which sits on the edge of the Pacific Ocean at Avila Beach in San Luis Obispo County, California, is an at-risk reactor like those in Japan.

The at-risk reactors are the Diablo Canyon Power Plant and San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station in California; the South Texas Project near the Gulf Coast; the Waterford Steam Electric Station in Louisiana; and the Brunswick Steam Electric Plant in North Carolina.

They appear in an analysis by the mapping and geographic data firm ESRI Inc., based in Redlands, Calif. The online map, the first of its kind to let the public search potential danger zones by address, includes U.S. Geologic Survey (USGS) seismic information and earthquake history for every nuclear plant in the USA.

After the Fukushima disaster, President Obama ordered the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to evaluate the earthquake risk of every nuclear plant in the nation, said Victor Dricks, an NRC spokesman. Dricks said NRC regulations require companies that build nuclear plants to take into account local seismic history and fortify the plants against the largest quake that is likely to occur.

Dricks said the U.S. has taken proper precautions to ensure the safety of its plants. San Onofre, for instance, is built to withstand a magnitude-7.0 earthquake within 5 miles of the site, he said. In addition, the plant is 30 feet above sea level and has a reinforced concrete sea wall that is 30 feet tall and could withstand a 27-foot tsunami.

Japan's Fukushima Dai-ichi plant suffered major damage from a magnitude-9.0 earthquake and 46-foot tsunami that hit March 11. The disaster triggered nuclear radiation leaks and an extensive evacuation in the region around the plant, which was built to withstand a 19-foot tsunami.

The ESRI map aims to help Americans determine their risk. It allows users to plug in their location and find the five nearest nuclear plants.

INTERACTIVE MAP: Find out how close you are to a nuclear plantUsers can also determine whether they live within 10-mile or 50-mile U.S. evacuation zones of any nuclear plants and whether the region around the plant has been jolted by any major earthquakes, measuring magnitude-7.2 or higher, in the past 30 years.

"All of the earthquakes on this map are significant," said ESRI analyst Bronwyn Agrios, noting that the analysis was eye-opening for those on ESRI's staff. "We found that we're just on the cusp of the evacuation zone of the San Onofre plant, just down the coast on the ocean side. Right around our area there have been three earthquakes. We're in a highly dense area for faults. We can feel that. We can feel tremors every week."

William Leith, acting associate director for natural hazards at the USGS, said it's impossible to predict the precise timing, location and magnitude of an earthquake, in part because quakes have been measured in the USA only for a century.

Although most nuclear plants are in the central and eastern USA, where earthquakes are rare, the USGS ranks 39 states as having a high or moderate earthquake risk, Leith said. New studies have shown that at least 20 magnitude-9.0 earthquakes have struck off the coast of Northern California, Oregon and Washington in the past 20,000 years, most recently in 1700, he said.

"We don't want to alarm anybody," he said, "but it can happen here."

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