!=

Dr. Irwin Redlener, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness, in Newsweek (Skipp, “The Holdouts,” 12 Sep ’08):

We just did a study on evacuations under scenarios of disasters without warnings. We are very concerned about disasters that occur without warning when we have to do evacuations in real-time—in essence, immediate—for example, an earthquake or a terrorist nuclear attack. We found about two thirds of people with children would not comply with official orders to evacuate until and unless they were able to retrieve their children from school or day care. If we have two thirds of the population with children that would not comply, what we would have is evacuation chaos and an absolute breakdown of disaster response in circumstances that provided no warning. Under those circumstances, unless we got much better at having well-developed disaster plans that parents were comfortable with, we can anticipate extreme chaos as public officials would be unable to stop parents determined to get their kids. [emphasis added]

One third of US parents would abandon their children to chaos. In the USG’s view, a “terrorist nuclear attack” seems to be relatively moderate chaos compared to, say, to the “extreme chaos” of families searching for each other.