The Best Laid Plans
If a terrorist incident occurs, county planners say they are ready. But plans hang on one thing: scared people following instructions.

By Michael S. Gerber

Montgomery County's Traffic Management Center looks like a sports fan's fantasy. An array of television screens covers the front wall, capable of displaying dozens of smaller images or just a few large pictures. A series of cameras throughout the county makes it possible for engineers in this renovated industrial building on Quince Orchard Road to keep tabs on the traffic situation at all times. On a typical day, only a few people sit in the darkened room, watching images of cars zipping by on the Beltway or slowly merging onto Interstate 270 during rush hour. The monotony of multitudes of cars moving across the screens and the dimly lit, gray room provide a sense of calmness, even as commuters grow frustrated at the Washington area's increasingly bad traffic.

But in the event of a terrorist attack, the traffic nerve center would spring to life, as would the rest of the Public Safety Communications Center, where it is located. Police and fire and rescue dispatchers can communicate with every emergency vehicle in the 500-square-mile county. And downstairs, Montgomery County officials would gather in the new, state-of-the-art Emergency Operations Center. Resembling a scaled-down version of NASA's Houston headquarters, the emergency center's rows of tables are equipped with computer and phone workstations for representatives of county agencies.

If a dirty bomb or other terrorist event in Washington forced the evacuation of parts of Washington or Montgomery County, this is where the leaders of the county would gather. Upstairs, back in the traffic center, officials could control every traffic light in the county. They could dispatch police and rescue personnel to encourage people to stay home or help speed the evacuations. They could work with the media to disseminate information to the public, telling them where to go — or not to go. And they could communicate face-to-face with each other and over the phone with other jurisdictions in the area.

The county has clearly invested time and millions of dollars into planning for such an event, including the Emergency Operations Center, which opened in the spring with the help of a federal grant. But despite the assurances that local officials are more prepared than ever for a major disaster — and there's no doubt they are — there's still a question of whether the extensive drills, preparations and technology would prevent chaos during an evacuation, or whether it can stop the public from hitting the roads and trying to escape when an evacuation has not been ordered.

After all, heavy rain at rush hour can lead to dozens of accidents and significant delays on the county's highways and major thoroughfares. Throw fear or even panic on top of that, and the situation easily could be worse than the recent tie-ups in the Southeast as thousands tried to escape the path of the summer's major hurricanes.

"The reality is, if everyone tries to evacuate, it's going to be massive gridlock," says Jim Resnick, the fire and rescue battalion chief who heads the county's Emergency Management office.

Which is one reason why the county and the entire metropolitan Washington region believe education before an event might be the most important factor in preventing gridlock during an emergency. If terrorists strike Washington, some area residents' first inclination will be to leave the area as quickly as possible. But officials know that a mass exodus will only create more problems, and they are stressing a different response: shelter in place. Sheltering at home or work allows local officials more time to analyze the situation and determine whether further action is needed. Home quite possibly could be the safest place during an attack, rather than in a car caught on a highway.

"There's a reason why we emphasize shelter in place, and it's not because it makes our job easier," says Bruce Mangum, a senior engineer in the county's Public Works and Transportation Department. "It's because it's the best and safest thing to do." Concerns about gridlock go beyond road rage and traffic delays: Traffic tie-ups would prevent emergency vehicles from getting to where they are needed. And in the event of a biological, chemical or nuclear attack, trying to evacuate could potentially put a resident at more risk of exposure than staying at home with the windows closed and a few days' supply of food and water.

Lessons from Sept. 11

On an average day, Washington-area traffic already overloads the infrastructure; an annual analysis of traffic delays by the Texas Transportation Institute recently ranked Washington the third most congested metropolitan area, after Los Angeles and San Francisco. About 350,000 Montgomery County workers commute each day by car, according to a 2003 census — more than 80 percent of all workers in the Washington area drive to work. At rush hour, any Washington driver knows how backed up the roads can be, from the major routes out of the city, like Connecticut and Wisconsin avenues, to the Beltway and I-270 in the suburbs.

On Sept. 11, 2001, when the federal government and most other Washington offices shut down following the attacks on the Pentagon and New York City, drivers found themselves stuck on the roads as most major arteries out of the city were gridlocked. Some, including the 14th Street Bridge from downtown D.C. to Northern Virginia, were closed by police, compounding the problem. "The lack of coordination between jurisdictions and agencies led to massive gridlock on the roads," according to a report by the Washington Council of Governments (COG), an organization of officials representing governments in the capital region.

"There's not enough street capacity to accommodate the population," says Phil Tarnoff, director of the University of Maryland's Center for Advanced Transportation Technology. "We try to evacuate D.C. every evening at 5 o' clock rush hour."

The lack of communication between traffic managers in D.C. and their Montgomery County counterparts also created problems. For example, the county can control traffic signals and change the timing of the lights to keep cars moving. But on Sept. 11, those signals were not coordinated with the District's traffic lights. Cars on Wisconsin Avenue backed up as far as the cameras could see into the District from Western Avenue, the border with Montgomery County. Once they crossed Western, the signals through Bethesda and to the Beltway were timed to prevent stagnation. Since then, Washington and Montgomery County have worked to coordinate signal timing along major routes, like Wisconsin and Georgia Avenue, to prevent backups into the District. University of Maryland transportation experts are studying whether the D.C.-area signal-timing plans are maximizing the capacity of the roads, according to Tarnoff. The study, conducted for the Federal Highway Administration, is still under way.

But coordination, officials admit, would only do so much if a large enough number of area residents decided they wanted to leave the area quickly. And that's the reason they emphasize that a large-scale evacuation is not even on the drawing board.

"We don't actually have evacuation routes planned out," says Donna Bigler, a spokeswoman for County Executive Doug Duncan. "It really depends on where something would occur." Bigler pointed to improvements in coordination between agencies and says county officials practice emergency drills throughout the year. But the key, she and other officials say, is encouraging people to prepare to stay home during a disaster and wait for further instructions.

"The word 'evacuation' we stay away from..." Mangum, of the county's Public Works Department, says, adding, "The likelihood of an event requiring an 'evacuation' [is] extremely slim, and if so it would be a limited area."

That's assuming that the public listens to instructions. On Sept. 11, there was no evacuation; people leaving work or choosing to leave the city caused the traffic problems. Disaster psychologists and sociologists have noted that there was little panic, and for the most part people were cooperative and helpful. But that might only last for so long if residents felt their safety was at risk.

"If people start running into obstacles, you get people doing stuff they're not supposed to do...so order breaks down, people start driving the wrong way down one-way streets," says Gil Reyes, a psychologist with the Disaster Mental Health Institute at the University of South Dakota. "The rules start breaking down — that's not really mass panic, that's just people deciding that the rule is not as important as what they're trying to accomplish."

But Reyes stressed that people do not usually panic until there is an immediate threat. Even if a dirty bomb explodes in D.C., suburban residents would be afraid, but not necessarily panicked — unless they fear the radiation somehow has spread to their neighborhoods. Of course, even before panic sets in, families might decide to hit the road before they feel it's too late. Parents of young children may ignore officials' recommendations and try to pick up their kids at school.

Talking to the county's emergency planners, it is clear that they are taking steps to prepare for an array of possibilities. But it is also obvious that they are relying on the public to listen to instructions should another terrorist attack hit Washington. Since Sept. 11, 2001, city, state, and federal officials as well as academics have conducted studies of how people react to disasters and how best to communicate with the public. In the Washington area, where so many jurisdictions overlap, officials emphasize the need for clear communication from the government.

"We have one chance, only one opportunity to get the message, and get it right," battalion chief Resnick says. "If we fail to get the message out as timely as it has to be, or the wrong message, there are consequences to that."

Despite all the changes to the region's emergency preparedness plans, there is only so much that can be done to predict the future and prevent problems. "There are just so many variables," Mangum says. Predicting people's reactions is even more difficult. If Northwest D.C. residents begin pouring out of the city into the suburbs because of a terrorist attack, they will need a place to go. And southern Montgomery County residents watching the news will hear conflicting messages, even if officials have coordinated their announcements. No matter how many times they've been told to shelter at home, some residents of Bethesda will try to get their families as far from D.C. as possible. It could make local officials long for the days when their biggest worry was a four-car pileup on the Beltway at rush hour.

Michael S. Gerber is a Bethesda freelance writer whose work has appeared in Legal Affairs and the Washington Business Journal.