“The first thing I’d do is shut off all access to the city when we get our ‘go.’ Make all access one way-outbound. Now, here in Manhattan only twenty-one percent of your people have first cars. Very low figure compared to the national average. That means eighty percent of the people have got to get out by other means. We’ll want to mobilize ail the buss we can lay our hands on. Any large truck fleets we can get, too. Luckily, we’ve got the use of the subways, which were more or less denied to us in our wartime scenario. We’ll want to make large use of them.
Load them up, switch them into the express lanes and tell them to go like hell. Send as many as we can into the upper Bronx. Take people as far up there as you can, and tell them to get out and walk.”
“Jesus Christ!” It was the Police Commissioner contemplating the chaos Oglethorpe’s ideas were going to produce. “Can you imagine the field day the looters are going to have?”
Oglethorpe smiled. “Sure, there are going to be plenty of scavengers combing your luxury highrises,” he admitted. “But if they’re ready to run the risk of being incinerated for a color TV, well, so be it. You can hardly expect your police, whom you’re going to need for more important matters anyway, to run around booking them as though Manhattan was going to be here on Wednesday morning.”
“Where are you going to put all those people?” the Mayor asked. “You can’t just take them out and dump them in a street in the Bronx or over in the Jersey Flats in the middle of winter.”
“Well, sir.” Oglethorpe straightened up. “Crisis relocation is based on the concept of risk areas and host areas. We move population from overpopulated risk areas to underpopulated host areas. In our New York `wartime scenario’
“-he was looking at a map of New York State = `we contemplated moving people as far out as Syracuse and Rochester. Here we’ll want to work much closer in. Ask the authorities in Westchester to prepare to welcome these people in what we in Civil Defense call `congregate care facilities’-schools and hospitals.”
Terrific, Walsh thought, listening to him. This is beautiful. Can you imagine the look on the Police Chief’s face up there in Scarsdale when we call up and say, Hey, Chief, look, we’re sending you up half a million of our best Bedford-Stuyvesant blacks for the weekend? The guy’ll go fucking bananas.
Suddenly it occurred to Walsh where he’d seen Oglethrope before. It was in Washington at a briefing in the Pentagon on crisis relocation. He’d come away from it convinced the idea of even trying to evacuate New York was bullshit, The New York temperament, the unruliness of the population, the sheer staggering size of it, it was all too overwhelming; better not to even think about it.
“How about the old, the infirm, the people who just can’t get up and move like that?” the Mayor was asking.
Oglethorpe gave a hopeless shrug. “You’ll just have to tell them to go underground and pray.”
He turned back to his chart. It had all been so clear in their studies.
Why, they had gamed the evacuation of New York three times in Washington in March 1977 on the computer, gradually working the time down from three days eighteen hours to three days flat. Everything was beautifully laid out, indexed and tabulated. You knew you had 3.8 million housing units in your risk area, with an average occupancy of 3.0 persons, ranging from 3.8 in Suffolk County to 2.2 in Manhattan. You knew you had 75,000 persons, 21,400 occupied units and 19,600 first autos per zip code in Nassau County, 40,000 persons, 19,400 units and 4,300 first autos in Manhattan.
They were going to use, for example, 310 commercial aircraft flying out of eight risk-area airports, seventy-one flights an hour over three days to move 1.24 million people. They had said it couldn’t be done, but they had found out how, turnaround times, everything. The trains. They knew how they’d use the six rail routes in and out of the city, how they’d maximize traffic flow. They had even figured out how they’d use the freight cars in the Jersey yards, thirty box cars and three locomotives a train; 2,500
people, which gave you an average space allowance of six square feet per person.
They bad counted in the Staten Island ferries, reckoning that taking over the automobile space they could get five thousand people onto a ferry. Even New York’s 125 tugboats and 250 open barges were included in their plans.
They had spent weeks identifying nine special highway routes suitable for getting people out of the city. It was all so well thought outright down to the fact that there were a quarter of a million people on Manhattan Island with pets who’d drive you crazy if they couldn’t take them along and half a million people with no luggage. But it was all based on three days-three days of careful, organized effort, not one spastic surge for the bridges like they were being asked to look at here.
Oglethorpe shook his head, trying to root out the dismay this disorderly problem caused his orderly mind, and plowed ahead. “The highways and the subways will have to be our principal modes. Everybody inside the five-PSI circle”-that was the five-pounds-per-squareinch-over-pressure circle, the second ring the Mayor had seen in Washington-“has got to come out. Personally, I’m happy if we can evacuate down to two PSI. Do that and we’ll be in great shape.
“We’ve got to maintain an orderly flow of cars out of the city. There are lots of ways. We can do it alphabetically. Broadcast the instructions on radio and TV: `Vehicles registered in the names of people beginning with A through D leave now!’ Or odd-even license plates. Do it by zip codes. Start with the high-risk zip codes at the Manhattan core and roll our risk out.”
“Look,” the Police Commissioner pointed out, “this place is an island. Cars are going to break down, overheat, run out of gas and jam the tunnels and bridges up. People are going to overload them with their families and their belongings. Remember those pictures of the people on the roads in France in 1940? Pushing baby carriages full of pots and pans?”
“Yes,” Oglethorpe agreed, “but our psychologists assure us that if a family has a car, they’ll use it. It gives them mobility and provides them with a sense of security.”
Timothy Walsh stirred uncomfortably. I think I’m dreaming here, he told himself. All these beautiful charts, these maps, these nice ideas. He looked at the Mayor and the Police Commissioner, so desperately attentive it was almost as though they were silently wishing that somehow all this could really be done.
“Look, mister,” Walsh said, “I don’t want to throw sour grapes around here, but I’m not sure you understand some of the facts of life in this town. You want to evacuate alphabetically? Tell Mr. Abbott to get in his car and go first? And you think Mr. Rodriguez up there in Spanish Harlem is going to sit around and watch him go tooling off? Sure he is. What Mr. Rodriguez is going to do is to be down there on the street corner with his Saturday-night special and he’s going to tell Mr. Abbott to get the fuck out of his car and walk. He’s riding.”
“That’s what the police are for. To maintain order and prevent that sort of thing.”
“The police?” Walsh couldn’t help laughing. “What makes you think the cops are going to obey? I tell you half of them are going to be out there on the street corner with their thirty-eights. Right beside Mr. Rodriguez. They are going to take over the first car they see and head for the hills, too.”
Walsh shrugged at the impracticality of it all. “All this stuff is great if you’ve got a bunch of trained soldiers. But you haven’t got any soldiers here. Just a bunch of scared people.”
“All right, Walsh,” the Police Commissioner barked angrily, “that’s enough of that.” Yet, despite his irate words, a sickening voice inside him told him that the lieutenant was probably right. He looked at Abe Stern. There was no expression on the Mayor’s face, no hint of what he really thought of all this.