Regional cooperation between the various levels of government
and public health agencies is essential if rural communities are
expected to cope with the huge influx of people they could receive
in the event of a natural disaster or terrorist attack in a large
city.
This was one of the conclusions that came out of a satellite
program on the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford campus entitled
“Mass Evacuations to Rural Communities” that is designed to assist
rural communities in planning for such possible events.
Hosting the program were Donald W. Rowe, public liaison at the
University of Buffalo’s School of Public Health and Health
Professions, and Dr. Brian Gerber, assistant professor, Division of
Public Administration in the School of Applied Social Sciences at
West Virginia University.
The sponsors are the Western New York Public Health Alliance
Rural Advanced Practice Center, which is funded by the National
Association of County and City Health Officials and the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention.
Rowe said, “The Alliance is a 501(c)3 corporation which is a
regional partnership comprised of county health departments in
Allegany, Cattaraugus, Chautauqua, Erie, Genesee, Niagara, Orleans
and Wyoming counties. Its mission, through partnerships, is to
enable an integral regional approach to achieve healthier
communities.”
The Alliance received a federal grant for the development of
Rural Preparedness Advanced Practice Center, which is to address
such matters as cross-border issues, training needs affecting rural
areas and partnerships and collaboration in rural preparedness.
According to Rowe, when rural communities are the destinations
of large numbers of evacuees from urban centers, they are concerned
with the questions of the number of evacuees and their length of
stay, which will affect the limits of the available resources. As
an example, counties near the New York-Pennsylvania border would be
probable destinations for people evacuating Buffalo and suburban
areas. For instance, Allegany County is considered 79 percent
rural, Rowe said.
Collaboration and partnerships of governmental and public health
officials between county-county, county-state and state-state must
be part of the planning and preparedness.
One of the Alliance’s projects is developing mapping and
planning software that can better predict mass evacuations. “This
new software will be easily accessible and could be used across the
United States and possibly Canada and Mexico.”
In his remarks, Gerber said past experiences in natural
disasters have shown that people adhere to evacuation advisories of
self-evacuation as they perceive their own vulnerability to the
danger.
“Less is known, however, about evacuations caused by terrorist
attacks,” Gerber said. “How people respond to these attacks is
important to the planning process.”
Gerber referred to a random-digit dial telephone survey that was
conducted in July and August and was a study of a hypothetical
catastrophic terrorist attack in Washington, D.C., that would
prompt a huge spontaneous evacuations of area residents. As part of
the survey, 800 households in Virginia, Maryland and West Virginia
were contacted by telephone and interviews were held with
county-level emergency managers in the study area and other
locations.
The survey results showed that over 85 percent of those polled
preferred their own automobiles as means of evacuation from a
natural disaster and 58.5 percent had definite destinations in
their plans. Even if just one-third of the Washington area
population evacuated, that would be a sizable number of people for
rural communities to handle.
The respondents were evenly split at 43 percent when asked
whether the media or government announcements caused their decision
to evacuate. In case of a news blackout, 67 percent said they were
likely to stay in place, while 33 percent were likely to leave
without any news information.
According to Gerber, the survey showed that the public has a low
confidence in governmental evacuation planning for disasters. For
example, only 6.6 percent expressed a great amount of confidence
for natural disasters and 7.5 percent for terrorist events.
Among those issues to be addressed in planning for mass
evacuations to rural areas are traffic, potable water, shelters,
power infrastructure, health care facilities and an adequate number
of personnel to handle the event.
Challenges for local planners are having local resources lasting
72 hours until federal resources arrive and self-evacuation to
avoid infectious diseases, and abilities to assess and
decontaminate.
At the same time, specific behavior of the public during
emergency evacuations is still not well understood.
The WVU Report on DC evacuation study should be completed within
the next couple of weeks, Gerber said. Then it can be viewed at
http://www.vmc.wvu.edu/evac.htm.
