On the road to disaster readiness

Friday, Jan. 12, 2007 | 6:57 a.m.

If a dirty bomb hits Las Vegas, get a book.

Traffic will be snarled, inching its way out of the city via a handful of routes as we try to escape the radioactive fallout that is the object of a dirty bomb. Evacuating 1.8 million people would take a long time.

During the Cold War, the last time Las Vegas had to worry about attacks, evacuation wasn't much of an issue. If the superpowers let loose with nuclear missiles, and if Nellis Air Force Base was targeted, the bombs might not have left enough people alive to worry about clogged roads.

The instructions from Civil Defense experts in those days was "duck and cover" to try to survive the first shuddering blast.

Today the region's population is 18 times what it was a half-century ago, and the terrorists' weapon of choice is likely a low-yield dirty bomb, built by strapping radioactive material to a conventional explosive to blow it into the atmosphere. Duck and cover would be a pointless exercise.

Better advice might be: "Sit and sleep." Let the traffic disperse.

Those new realities about warfare and Las Vegas were on the minds of more than 100 people - representing such groups as the Nevada Transportation Department and the American Red Cross - who met Thursday at the Orleans for the first Statewide Evacuation, Mass Care and Sheltering-in-Place Planning Conference.

The meeting, Aaron Kenneston says, is the start of something he hopes will bear tangible results by the end of this year. Kenneston is Washoe County's emergency manager and project director for the Statewide Evacuation Planning Initiative.

"I'd like to buy five 1,000-bed shelters and have them in different places in the state by the end of this year," he says.

Although there has been disagreement about the juiciness of Las Vegas as a terrorist target, last week the city regained a spot on the Homeland Security Department's list of high-risk targets. That makes us not only more aware, but eligible for millions more in federal dollars.

But terrorist attacks aren't the only disasters on the minds of planners. What if that long-awaited earthquake - we are also third on a list of most seismically active states, according to a 2006 UNR study - rolls its way down the Strip? Will we be prepared to provide Porta Potties, Meals Ready to Eat, cots, medical help and other sundries for the thousands of sick, dying or newly homeless?

The answer on Thursday: Supplies won't be as much of a problem as the coordination needed to get those supplies to the people - so that what happened in New Orleans doesn't happen here.

Kenneston stressed that when he uses the word shelter, he doesn't just mean a place to lie down. When he saw the televised shots of New Orleans in 2005, his "heart just sank" at the so-called shelters "without Porta Potties, no pallets of MREs, no potable water. You need those supplies, or it's not a shelter."

Without a doubt, shelters will be a major part of Nevada's plan - if only because the emergency officials would like as many people as possible to stay off the roads. One woman, saying she had recently been stuck in a traffic jam in Northern Nevada, talked of the dangers of that kind of chaos, envisioning someone stuck in traffic "grabbing a shotgun ... and shooting his way through that mess."

Kenneston's ambitious timeline calls for basic shelters to be available by the end of this year, with "special needs" procedures in place in 2008 and the shelters fully equipped by 2009.

On another topic, Kenneston said that no one wants to see images, a la New Orleans, of some big police officer taking a pet dog from a woman because dogs aren't allowed in shelters. Also, Hurricane Katrina demonstrated that some pet lovers will risk their lives rather than leave a stranded pet.

Considering that the 46-year-old Kenneston remembers nuclear attack drills as a grade school student in Boulder City - "we had to get under the desk" - his vision would go a long way in demonstrating how far the state has evolved since the 1950s.

"We'll take some of the good things from the old Civil Defense programs, add some new things, and hope we come up with a more realistic look," Kenneston says.

If disaster occurs, "there will be chaos, but at least we'll have the plans to get something in place to help."