Mecklenburg County emergency planning officials say they are confident our local nuclear evacuation plan, which is very similar to other plans around the country, will work. Not everyone agrees. New York Governor George Pataki, for instance, has asked the federal government to review emergency evacuation plans for all the country's nuclear power plants, including those for the 10-mile zones around McGuire and Catawba Nuclear Stations. Pataki's actions came in February, after a survey showed that the evacuation plan for the area around New York's Indian Point nuclear power plant was grossly inadequate.
Because news of a disaster would carry further than the 10-mile zone by radio, television and cell phone, the survey, conducted for an environmental group called Riverkeeper, showed that a nuclear emergency would trigger mass evacuations well beyond the 10-mile radius that governments prepare for, causing bottlenecks and preventing those closest to the plant from escaping.
Because Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) requirements for evacuation plans don't envision terrorist attacks, or a widespread radioactive release following a meltdown of a nuclear reactor, the Indian Point nuclear evacuation plan -- like Mecklenburg County's plan -- covers only 10 miles around the plant site. That's sufficient for dealing with most accidents -- nuclear regulatory agencies assume there will be a slow radiation leak that could be stemmed in a few hours -- but not a major catastrophe that could contaminate an area 50 miles around the plant site.
It's exactly the kind of accident Tom Bevan, Director of the Center for Emergency Response Instruction and Policy at Georgia Tech, has lost sleep over. He says that the federally mandated, 10-mile-zone plans in use today aren't equipped to handle the kind of catastrophic radiation release government studies have suggested could be caused by a terrorist attack.
"Radiation does not recognize where the 10-mile line stops," said Bevan. "If there is a catastrophic release, it could travel on the wind for hundreds of miles. But I have not seen any indication the federal government plans to revise their evacuation plans," said Bevan.
Invisible MenaceEvery year, residents who live in the 10-mile EPZ around Catawba and McGuire Nuclear Stations get calendars in the mail featuring idyllic nature scenes. At the bottom of each month, in small print, are instructions for what to do in the event of a nuclear emergency. Toward the back are descriptions of evacuation routes and a map that carves the 10-mile zone into 19 smaller action zones where a couple hundred to 20,000 people live and work. Since the map isn't very detailed, it's hard to tell which subdivisions and office parks fall into which zones. But the gist of the plan is that in the event of a nuclear emergency, people will figure out which zone they live in, and then turn on the radio or television to find out what they should do. Those decisions will ultimately be made by high-ranking city and county emergency response planners operating from a centralized command station. The information they based their evacuation decisions upon would come from another call center, deep within the Duke Energy building downtown, where plant, federal and state officials would track the unfolding disaster.
According to the evacuation plan, by the time the emergency sirens sound near the plant, it's likely that the two centers will already be manned and ready to give citizens evacuation instructions. If the situation occurred during the school day, school buses carrying children would already be on the road, headed out of the zone, before the general public was informed there was reason to evacuate.
It sounds great on paper, says Dr. Donald Ziegler, a professor at Old Dominion University. But no matter how prepared local officials are, he says, it won't work. Because radiation is an invisible phenomenon, he says, it fosters a much different reaction in people than fire or hurricanes. With hurricanes and fires, there's typically at least a 24-hour advance warning that evacuation might be necessary. People have time to prepare. But nuclear accidents are different, he says.
For the past 20 years, Ziegler and a group of his colleagues have dedicated their scientific careers to studying the nation's nuclear evacuation plans and the aftermath of nuclear disasters like Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. But despite all the studies he's published, he and his colleagues have so far failed to convince the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) that plans like Mecklenburg County's are based on faulty assumptions that could have deadly consequences.
The federally mandated nuclear evacuation plans in use in this country have always been out of sync with the time it actually takes radiation to spread. Mecklenburg County's plan for the evacuation of up to 195,000 people from the EPZ around McGuire in under eight hours may meet federal guidelines, but by the federal government's own standards, that's not nearly fast enough to keep fleeing people out of the path of radiation. According to a FEMA report called Dynamic Evacuation Analysis, which does not take into account terrorist attacks, it would take only half an hour to two hours for a radiation release to travel five miles from the plant, and from one to four hours for it to spread 10 miles.
"You can absorb enough radiation in a short period of time that you experience radiation poisoning which can lead to death in a few days or a few weeks," said Edwin Lyman, scientific director at the Nuclear Control Institute, a non-profit organization in Washington, DC that examines risks of nuclear terrorism. "That kind of exposure is only five to 10 miles from the site. Within two hours, radiation exposure will be well beyond 10 miles. Can they evacuate the 10-mile zone in two hours? Notification alone might take two hours. But if they could do it with a well-functioning evacuation plan, they could get it down to a few hundred deaths."
Lyman says the reason that more realistic, two-hour evacuation plans aren't required by law is that they would be nearly impossible to carry out. And if they were nearly impossible to carry out, nuclear energy plants would never be approved anywhere, because they must present workable evacuation plans to federal regulators as part of their licensure.
Experts like Bevan and Ziegler, who have extensively studied the Chernobyl disaster, say even eight-hour evacuation plans like ours far underestimate the amount of time it would take to move people out of the EPZ. They say the faulty time assumptions begin to crumble the moment crisis occurs at the plant. As with other plans across the country, the evacuation time estimates in Mecklenburg County's plan are based on the assumption that the utilities' operators will immediately notify emergency planners that there has been an accident or a terrorist attack.
"We would know quickly the magnitude of the radiation," said Mecklenburg Emergency Management Director Wayne Broome.
But history shows that that isn't typically what happens. During the near-meltdown at Three Mile Island in 1979, plant managers didn't tell the media or public officials the full extent of what was going on, and went so far as to convey the impression that the accident was substantially less severe, and the situation more under control, than it actually was, according to a summary of US House of Representatives hearings on the matter.
It happened again in February 2000, when Consolidated Edison delayed calling public officials for an hour after the reactor at Indian Point Power Plant blew a steam tube and released radioactive steam into the air. When company representatives finally did notify officials outside the plant, they denied that any radiation had escaped the reactor, though in fact it had. The plant was later shut down for 11 months.
"In scientific terms, that's called operator optimism," said Paul Gunter, Director of the Reactor Watchdog Project for Nuclear Information and Resource Service in Washington, DC. "Rather than send out an emergency announcement that will alarm the public, they will sent out a less serious warning or no warning at all to delay the evacuation to buy time to try to bring the plant in order."
Of course, that's if the plant's operators can quickly pinpoint the problem among the plant's multiple, complex systems. As the accident at Three Mile Island played itself out, there was genuine confusion, even among Nuclear Regulatory Commissioners, over what was actually happening and how to respond to it. After Three Mile Island, it took a full five years for nuclear experts to agree on what caused it.
News Spreads QuicklyFrom the first moment of a large-scale nuclear crisis, evacuation plans like Charlotte-Mecklenburg's would be heavily dependent on emergency workers on the ground, particularly bus drivers who would move children and special populations who can't drive themselves, police and fire personnel whose job it would be to set up road blocks and control the flow of traffic, and medical personnel who would treat the injured.
In a disaster like a fire or a hurricane, where the threat to safety is actually visible, emergency personnel are fairly dependable. But, say sociologists, emergency personnel respond differently to radiation leaks, which are invisible.
"It is very likely that emergency responders will have a rate of no-shows during a nuclear event," said Gunter. "Because of the widespread nature of a nuclear accident, they will think of their families first. That isn't figured into these plans."
History and science supports this contention, as sociologist James Johnson has documented in study after study, the most compelling of which was one he conducted in the vicinity of Shoreham Nuclear Power Station on Long Island in New York. When asked "What do you think you would do first if an accident requiring a full scale evacuation of the population within 10 miles of the plant were to occur?", 68 percent of firefighters and 73 percent of bus drivers said family obligations would take precedence over emergency duties. Less than a fourth of public school teachers surveyed said they would help evacuate students.
At one local hospital during the Three Mile Island accident, only six of 70 physicians scheduled for duty showed up -- at a hospital a full 25 miles away from the evacuated zone and supposedly out of range of the released radiation.
Clear roads and well-directed traffic would be critical in the aftermath of a terrorist attack on a nuclear plant, or a severe nuclear accident. To evacuate those closest to the plant, nothing must stand in the way of their cars and the open road headed out of the 10-mile EPZ. This means that when emergency planners tell folks located within the 19 zones inside the EPZ that those in certain zones are to evacuate and others are to stay put based on the direction the wind is carrying the radiation, people will have to take their advice if the plan is to work.
"I don't see a major traffic condition because everyone isn't going to be moving at the same time," said Broome. "If citizens will follow the instructions and directions we give them, it will work."
If things go according to the plan, the media will first hear about the nuclear emergency from emergency planners and then pass valid evacuation instructions along to their audiences. But that assumes that emergency officials can control when and how people find out about a nuclear emergency long enough to staff emergency stations, assess the situation, and advise the public before a mass evacuation began.
Two problems aren't figured into that equation. First, it would be impossible to hide a large-scale terrorist attack or a crash by a commercial, wide-bodied jet into a nuclear power plant since nearby neighbors could see and hear it for themselves. The smoke would be visible for miles and the media would quickly learn about the situation.
The other factor that hasn't been figured in is the popularity of cell phones.
"A nuclear accident is going to be hard to black out," said Gunter. "It's likely that plant personnel will call their families before the public finds out what's going on. Once the word is outside the plant, the media will know. Once they order the bus drivers to evacuate the children, they'll call their families, children will call their parents and the word will be out."
In fact, says Gunter, it's possible that the media could learn about a potential catastrophe before emergency planners do -- or that emergency planners could learn about an accident not from Duke Energy officials, but from the media. By then, he says, the evacuation will likely have already begun.
Spontaneous EvacuationTwo decades of studies and surveys show that even if local officials somehow manage to black out news of a nuclear catastrophe long enough to organize an evacuation, the majority of the population is unlikely to listen to their advice.
According to sociologist R.E. Kasperson in Risk Analysis, a large portion of the public say they distrust information about nuclear dangers and accidents made public through official channels. So even if the information is accurate, Kasperson wrote, it may not be believed.
That's exactly what happened after Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island nuclear plant experienced a partial meltdown in 1979. State officials had ordered a limited evacuation of 3,400 pregnant women and preschool children living within five miles. Instead, 144,000 people fled, some living up to 40 miles from the plant.
But Three Mile Island wasn't an isolated incident in the human nuclear drama. In survey after survey, large percentages of people living within 50 miles of nuclear plants have told surveyors that no matter what they're told to do by local officials, they would evacuate a median distance of 85 to 100 miles from the plant.
"In the Charlotte area, you would have spontaneous evacuations that would be so massive so far out from the plant that it would create bottlenecks that would trap people closer in," said Gunter.
In addition, some surveys have shown that significant numbers of parents wouldn't trust bus drivers to drive their children to safety and would try to reach them, severely complicating the evacuation. This would be further complicated by the fact that most of the evacuation centers the kids would be taken to are right outside the 10-mile zone, still well within the 25-mile danger zone. It's unknown how officers directing traffic out of the zone would respond to panicked parents attempting to drive back in, but if martial law were declared -- which Broome says would not happen -- they would have the authority to use their weapons to force parents to comply with the law.
In a survey of residents living around the Shoreham nuclear plant in New York, the sheer magnitude of the probable evacuation stampede was documented. Those living within five miles of the plant were asked what they would do if they were advised to stay indoors due to a nuclear emergency. Though the Shoreham evacuation plan estimated that only 2,700 families would flee after hearing the announcement over the radio, survey results showed that in reality, 215,000 families would attempt to evacuate by car. While no such survey has ever been conducted here, these statistics indicate that if a nuclear accident were to happen at McGuire, between 200,000 and 400,000 people would evacuate, pouring onto our already congested roads, struggling to escape, but finding themselves trapped.
"Would there be spontaneous evacuation?" said Broome. "Yes. How much? I don't know."
Two-Lane EscapePart of the problem with our county's evacuation plans is that while the designated evacuation routes haven't changed much, the number of people living and working along them has.
It's Thursday at lunchtime and the four-lane section of Highway 73 in front of the strip mall at Lake Norman and Interstate 77 is jam-packed with cars inching along. The light at the intersection changes, but nobody moves. About an eighth of a mile ahead, Highway 73 East bottlenecks into two lanes. All the while, construction equipment hums in the background, grading lots, raising rafters on homes, condos and offices along Lake Norman's main drag. But the strip of highway is more than just the gateway to and from the lake. It's also one of the main nuclear escape routes should the unthinkable happen at McGuire Nuclear Station just up the road. For the majority of its length, it's only two lanes wide. But according to the county's evacuation plan, more than 47,000 people within the 10-mile zone are supposed to use 73 West and 73 East to escape in the event of full evacuation.
This isn't as big a surprise as it may seem. The vast majority of the designated escape routes out of the 10-mile zone around McGuire are no wider than two lanes on each side.
While Broome says it's likely that both inbound and outbound lanes of I-77 will be used for escaping traffic, on internal, two-lane roads like NC 73, only one lane is likely to be used for outgoing traffic because the other will be needed for traffic moving through the evacuation zone in the opposite direction toward other escape routes. That may not cause as much congestion as it may seem, he says, because not everyone will attempt to use the designated escape routes and some people may use undesignated roads they are more familiar with.
"There will be free-flow evacuation too," said Broome. "People living in the area have a better understanding of the roads in the area than I do."
But that defeats the purpose of a controlled evacuation plan, says Gunter.
"The idea of having an evacuation route is that you can control traffic," Gunter said. "When people start taking their own routes, you are likely to have accidents and other kinds of events that could close them."
Broome says that in that situation, blocked routes could be accessed by helicopter and emergency workers brought in to help clear accidents. But will it be enough?
In 1998, Flagler County, FL, officials ordered 40,000 residents to evacuate after three raging fires threatened to converge into a massive firestorm. Once the stampede started, emergency workers were powerless to stop it. Cars lined up 20 deep at filling stations to get gas to take them to safety, accidents blocked escape routes, and panicky motorists heading north on Florida 100 turned the two-lane highway into four lanes, blocking emergency personnel trying to reach the injured from getting to them.
Another big part of the problem with this type of stampede is that in a nuclear evacuation, those directing traffic may need to quickly change the direction in which it is headed.
"It is very likely that wind shifts will occur and take the plume of radiation in a variety of different directions," said Gunter. "Once you get people going, it will be very difficult to stop them or change their direction, particularly when you have people spontaneously evacuating and using other routes that could very well complicate a dedicated evacuation route."
Over the next few months, plans for distribution of potassium iodide pills by the county's public health bioterrorism team will be announced. But even county Homeland Security Director Wynn Mabry cautions that while the pills can help mitigate the effects of some radiation exposure, they will be useless to prevent many others. "We don't want citizens to think this is the magic radiation pill and they don't have to evacuate," said Mabry.
With A Little Education. . .It's hard to say who's to blame for the state of nuclear evacuation planning in the United States. Before September 11, the possibility of an attack on a nuclear plant seemed remote, the chance of a major catastrophic meltdown even more so. Unintentional nuclear accidents caused by equipment failure just don't happen enough in this country, or throughout the world, for nuclear evacuation planning to have been given serious attention.
In the meantime, municipalities like those in Mecklenburg County packed development into their nuclear escape routes with no thought given to what might happen if those routes ever had to be used. In fact, Crescent Resources -- Duke Energy's development arm -- has made millions of dollars developing land directly around the reactor, building thousands of homes in sprawling, upscale subdivisions, many of which are only accessible by two-lane roads.
Now, in the post-9/11 era, communities like those around the Indian Point reactor are demanding realistic evacuation planning that includes a 50-mile radius around the plant, and a vocal minority is demanding that the plant be shut down completely.
But unlike Indian Point officials, local emergency coordinators like Mabry say they have no intention of radically changing our nuclear evacuation plans.
"We're building on plans that exist," he said. "We are not trying to reinvent the wheel."
Short of a shutdown, given the state of traffic congestion and our local roads, there likely is little emergency planners could do to seriously improve their plans. But what can be improved is public education.
As it currently stands, federal utility regulators don't require utility companies to undertake any informational campaign beyond the 10-mile planning zone, even though it's an area where spontaneous evacuation is projected to be a problem and where contamination by radiation would still be a very real threat. Even within the 10-mile zone, it seems unlikely that little-read and skeptically received flyers and other information about what to do in a nuclear disaster are going to change longstanding fears of nuclear radiation.
Because FEMA isn't required to assess the impact of this information on how much the public knows or understands about nuclear emergency procedures, no one really knows exactly how the people in any given community would react to a nuclear disaster.
But, say Ziegler and others who have studied the issue, thoughtful, consistent public information campaigns that emphasize the importance of everyone's cooperation during an evacuation could help change that.
In the meantime, local emergency planners continue to do what they can to improve the emergency evacuation process for all types of disasters. Broome says local officials are currently working on a Geographic Information System-based data layering program that would help emergency planners quickly identify the location by latitude and longitude of schools, rest homes, daycares and other places that hold special populations, so they can be better targeted by air during an emergency. And though the general public doesn't participate, emergency planners practice emergency evacuation procedures every year.
"You are looking at one point in a 20-plus-year planning process that is refined as circumstances change and new laws come into effect," said Broome. "Our plan is better than it was 20 years ago."
