You want to evacuate what?

Over the last two weeks, the metro Washington area has had some foul weather roll through. Heavy winds, power outages, downed trees. I have discussed this in relation to personal preparation, but now I want to discuss regional response.

Metro Washington practices, like most regions, a form of evacuation almost every day. It is called rush hour. But when you add in scattered power outages and associated debris, it becomes a rather interesting mess. Reports of traveling a few feet per minute are not unusual, but it tends to break free, but spending time logged in fractions of an hour to go a few yards is absurd, yet, it happens, more often than not and over the past few weeks it has been the norm. And that is with all major forms of transportation fully functional. Imagine the chaos if one of the forms of transportation is unavailable.

Yet the regional plan is to evacuate the area. With buses. After one finishes laughing about the mythical buses, one has to have a sobering drink to begin to absorb the real impact that any sort of disaster could do to this region if this is what a summer storm can do.