While the news is buzzing with disasters all over, often residents are advised or even mandated to evacuate.
I can’t imagine how anyone would/could evacuate Chicago. Our roads barely handle routine traffic, evacuation sounds like Mega-gridlock to me, maybe more like super glue gridlock.
Should there ever be an evacuation order for the Chicago area, I think I’d just hide in the basement and listen to WGN on a hand-cranked radio.
Seriously, does anyone know how to evacuate Chicago?
Definitely not in a car! Try a motorcycle, bicycle, or on foot! If all else fails, climb into a barrel and float out on the river. It’s worked before.
It’s an interesting thought. The same must be true of other cities, though, as well – I mean, no major city has wide open freeways.
I believe that, in an evacuation, they close off all inward-bound lanes, so that ALL lanes would be outward-going – that would double the allowable traffic. I think I saw aerial footage of a hurricane evacuation a few years ago, and that was clear. Trafffic was still pretty slow to standstill, though.
Indeed, that’s one of the purposes of the entrance ramp barricades installed on the Kennedy a couple of years ago.
Because I live downtown, I’ve given the matter a bit too much thought, and have a bugout bag packed in the entry closet. If I can get to my car, I’ll be using surface streets until I get way downstate. If not, I’ll try to get on a Metra train and wear my good walking shoes.
Chicago can’t be in that bad a situation. Look at New York City - that’s mostly on islands which creates a bunch of chokepoints.
Look at Long Island - a population of 7,568,304 people and there are only ten bridges off the island and eight of those go to another island.
I’m already up by the Willow Road exit on the Edens so for me alone it would be jump on the motorcycle and off I go.
Of course in reality I’d have to go find the kids in Jefferson Park and Fifille out by Cumberland and Addison…so yeah- screwed.
I’d drive as far as Burnham Harbor, find a boat and head east.
Only one person mentioned rail, and then only as a backup? 
Considering the inevitable gridlock, my first choice would be Metra. They already “evacuate” huge crowds out of downtown every weekday afternoon. 
More to the point, they already have a plan for dealing with people returning home from large downtown events: they throw the schedules out the window and run on an “load and go” basis from the downtown terminals.
The Metra Electric trains can only go as far as the end of the catenary at University Park, although I imagine they can use the South Shore line to get as far away as South Bend, IN, if going east is viable given the particular emergency, but I’m sure the rest of the trains wouldn’t end at their usual outer terminals but would keep going as far and as fast as they could.
Of course, a lot depends on why they’re evacuating, and that reminded me of this map.
http://cache.gawkerassets.com/assets/images/4/2011/04/chicago-powerplants.jpg
That shows the evacuation zones if we had a nuclear disaster similar to the one in Japan. The small radius is the evacuation zone by the Japanese government, the big radius is what the U.S. told it’s citizens in Japan to evacuate.
Yeah, we’d be pretty screwed.
“Yeah, we’d be pretty screwed.”
On a somewhat related subject I was 11 years old when the then Fire Commissioner Quinn set off the air raid sirens after the Sox clinched the pennant. I guess the exact time is available somewhere, but I suspect it was after 11:00 PM. Anyway, when they started blaring no one in my Edgewater neighborhood thought of evacuating, or even running to their basements for that matter. In fact, most everyone ran from their houses, stood in the street and looked up.
Thing is, I don’t live in NYC…I live right on the north border of Chicago.
Several problems with the train:
First, not everyone is downtown. People will want to return home first to get children, pets, possessions. Second, only a portion of the Metra fleet is kept downtown, even during weekdays. In case of something like a dirty bomb, how many Metra employees would offer to come back into the city for another load? Third, what would happen to the evacuees who arrived in Aurora or Elburn or Joliet? How would we continue our trips on to other places?
Metra isn’t an option for everyone,as you say, but every one of the thousands of people for whom it is an option is one fewer on the gridlocked roads.
As to your points:
To me, it comes down to an educated guess that not all evacuations entail disorder but unavoidably entail gridlock. I’m no survivalist, so if it comes down to a breakdown scenario where every evacuee must carry all his own resources with no significant prospect of help or die, I’m sunk.
You guys have convinced me. I’m buying a jet-pack this weekend.
Byron’d probably be screwier, given the prevailing winds are west -> east, and it’s almost due west of the metro area. They didn’t include it on the map, though.
Even on UP, NW, or BNSF, the engineers, in most cases, have not been qualified for those subdivisions, which may have different signal systems or special rules. In the case of the Rock Island and Milwaukee districts, there is no track beyond Metra territory or it’s under the control of a private railroad that Metra has no relationship with. The Electric District can’t run past the end of the wire.
Where would the passengers disembark? And most important, if the train keeps going, it can’t run back downtown to get another load of people. Metra doesn’t have enough trains to carry 300,000 people in one direction at one time; more like 150,000 even if every car and locomotive is already in place. Each trainset cycles at least twice in any weekday rush hour.
Jet pack? Pfft. Time to start working on a teleporter…
Do you really think that in a situation where an entire city has to be evacuated and the engineers, conductors, and passengers are fleeing in panic for their very lives the engineer is going to say “Well, the company has no relationship with the owner of the tracks beyond this point and I could face a disciplinary action for going any further, so I will wait here for the inferno to catch up with us”? Are engineers trained like the dogs who will allegedly starve themselves rather than eat without command from their owners?
Of course, the Metra Electric division would have a problem when the overhead wires ran out and the diesel trains would eventually run out of fuel. In fact, we could probably not assume that electric supply would continue uninterrupted during a disaster and allow the electric trains to operate at all. And if there were an interruption to electric supply, diesel train crews could not rely on electric track switches and safety signals and would probably already be violating all sorts of rules just to get their trains out of the stations.
Where would the passengers disembark? Probably as far away from the spreading mushroom cloud as they could get before running out of fuel. The lack of a station platform wherever that might be would probably be the least of their concerns.
Capacity would of course be a problem. Engineers already in the station might take off with a load of passengers already on board, but probably wouldn’t wait for many more people nor make all scheduled stops to pick up more people outside the downtown area. It’s really unlikely that any would return to the disaster area a couple of times to pick up more people if that were even possible.
A railroad is not like a highway that a rogue truck driver can just barrel onto. Signals have to be cleared; switches have to be set. That’s done by dispatch centers in Fort Worth or Omaha or Jacksonville, which a Metra engineer will have no easy way of communicating with.
My guess is that would not be permitted. I assume emergency evacuation procedures would involve all highways going out, none coming in. Trains ditto. With emergency evacuation teams (police, national guard, army, navy, etc) blocking off roads, etc. I dunno, however. It would be interesting if we could find someone who has undergone an evacuation (someone from N’Orleans, say?) to comment.
