One fateful day in spring 1990, Max Rubin awoke to a scene of nuclear disaster.
Two nukes had exploded 12 miles off Evanston, detonating in the air above Lake Michigan. The shockwave created a seiche, a tidelike phenomenon, that inundated the northern suburb. But flooding was the least of Evanston`s problems.
From the initial blasts and aftershocks, ”We had 15,000 dead, 45,000 injured and 25,000 hospitalized,” in the city of 73,706, says Rubin, Evanston`s emergency and disaster relief coordinator. He`s also the city`s head of building operations.
A listener expressed incredulity at the numbers. So many casualties?
”It`s not my fault. They dropped two bombs on me,” says Rubin in mock defensiveness.
The ”attack” was really a national drill conducted by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, in Washington, D.C. It was an opportunity for disaster-response planners across the U.S. to find out whether they had their acts together, if they could respond well with all hell breaking loose.
For Armageddon, it was pretty low-key. Little if any evidence of the event would have been obvious to the public because it was, in the vernacular of bureaucrats, a ”tabletop” exercise. Disaster managers mainly sat in special emergency operation centers, fire stations and other official buildings and communicated with their people in the field and the feds, rehearsing procedures they`d hope to use if the real thing ever happened.
When your job consists of constantly thinking about the unthinkable and preparing for it, life is filled with such exercises. Besides the nuclear bomb exercise, there`s the earthquake exercise, the deadly chemical release exercise, the tornado exercise. Of course, sometimes you get to handle the real thing. Not the nuclear war scenario, but other types of mass mayhem human beings fall prey to.
For most of us, there`s a tendency to deny reality, especially if it`s scary. We`d rather live blissfully oblivious to the fact that life is one disaster after another waiting to happen. How else can we explain that while California, our most populous state, is just one big earthquake zone waiting to rip off from the mainland, the people there are known to be some of our most mellow fellow citizens?
But there are those among us who`ve chosen not to bury their heads in the sand. Not only do they take on disasters as they`re happening, but they concoct phony catastrophes, all for the sake of preparedness.
Disaster managers are the first to admit they could easily be mistaken for pessimists. Where most people might view a sold-out concert at the Rosemont Horizon as a fun night out, disaster planners must consider what would happen if a 747 jumbo jet slammed into the building as the big act took the stage.
”We`re the masters of disaster,” says Rubin. ”We have to look at the downside of everything. Take the Evanston garage sale, the world`s largest garage sale, whatever. There`ll be all those thousands of people. To them it will be a good time and lots of shopping. But I`ve got to think about what happens if the garage collapses.”
Not that a collapse is likely, Rubin quickly adds. ”Don`t scare people away,” he says. The big municipal garage has been thoroughly inspected and can take the crowds expected for the sale at the end of July, he says. But a good disaster manager is a big worrywort.
Beyond the bomb
So, if you`re Rubin, you do things like permanently park a trailer loaded with 50 backboards used to immobilize trauma victims in downtown Evanston where you can get to them fast in an emergency. And in the event you must evacuate the city, you`ve mapped out all the exit routes and the spots where you`d station police.
Most disasters, like politics, tend to be local. So most municipalities have someone, often the police or fire chief, designated as the disaster manager. If a crisis becomes more than a locality can handle, then disaster managers at the county, state and federal levels are called in for more resources.
During the peak of the Cold War, in the 1950s and 1960s, disaster managers were a bit obsessed with civil defense. They maintained air raid sirens, put up all those now-fading yellow and black fallout shelter signs, and taught grammar school kids how to duck and cover.
But the Cold War is passing into memory. Local disaster managers still worry about nuclear war preparations, as proven by last year`s big exercise. They must if they want federal funding.
But planning for the bomb has become less fashionable. In 1989, the Chicago Fire Department, for instance, disbanded its civil defense unit in favor of its emergency preparedness and disaster service, says Mike Cosgrove, a department spokesman. And, in an ever-increasing silent testimony to the changes, only 17 of the city`s more than 90 air raid sirens still work.
In recent years disaster masters have broadened their focus to include all manner of natural and man-made calamities, from earthquakes to factory explosions, from terrorism to telephone outages that might effect tens of thousands. The particular emphasis depends on the locale. ”We`re more interested in the local plane or train crash than earthquake or tornado,”
says Cosgrove. Meanwhile, Downstate, where towns are closer to the infamous New Madrid fault line, earthquake preparations are popular.
”Civil defense,” says Rubin, ”has changed into a more integrated emergency management, the whole thing being that you plan for a disaster, an interruption of services. It doesn`t matter what caused it. You`re going to have casualties and you`ll have to shelter people.”
A ticking suburb
”It`s a tougher job now than it was years ago,” Jerry Lee Grubman says of the municipal disaster-manager`s role. An official of the Illinois Emergency Services and Disaster Agency, she oversees disaster preparations in Cook and Lake Counties.
What makes the job more difficult, she says, is the greater potential for disasters today compared with the past.
The frequency and severity of major storms, like tornadoes, has increased, she says. (It appears this will be another record year, the second in a row, for twisters, says the National Weather Service. Weather experts aren`t sure why, but theories range from global warming to the current violent sunspot cycle.)
Aggravating the situation are population centers that are springing up because of the development of what was once farmland, and increased building in flood plains.
Grubman has been at her share of disasters. She was the Chicago Fire Department paramedic in charge at O`Hare International Airport on May 25, 1979, when American Airlines Flight 191 bound for Los Angeles crashed shortly after takeoff, killing 273.
Last Aug. 28 she was driving through Plainfield on the way to her home in Sandwich when a tornado whipped through town, nearly hurling her car into a cornfield. The tornado killed 29 and injured as many as 500.
Grubman had been heading home because a bad storm had been forecast. She wanted to make sure her sump pump was working. Instead she wound up at the Plainfield police station, helping local officials, including the mayor who was bleeding from injuries, get a handle on the extent of casualties and damage, and coordinate relief efforts.
For Grubman, Elk Grove Village illustrates the problems faced by the modern disaster master. ”That`s one place I worry about a lot,” says Grubman.
She`s in her office, the erstwhile bandroom of Maine Township North High School. The abandoned Des Plaines school now serves as state offices. (”I`ve asked them to at least remove the stage,” she says of her office. So far, no luck. The band stage still sits at the front of the room.)
She goes to a shelf and removes Elk Grove Village`s disaster plan and a companion document from their place among the submissions of all the other municipalities` on the shelf.
”They`re heavy with industry and natural problems,” says Grubman, who has been with the state agency eight years. ”They`ve got a lot of stuff in some of those plants that could blow most of the village right off the map.” Indeed, an analysis of possible disasters by the village itself indicates great havoc might come from a variety of sources. High on the list are floods (Salt Creek, which runs through the village, overflows its banks each year)
and tornadoes. Major explosions and fires could be triggered by several bulk gas and propane tanks or a number of large natural gas lines that pass through the village.
Elk Grove Village`s proximity to O`Hare also makes it a potential target for plane crashes. Such an accident could kill nearly 1,000 people if the plane hit a populated area in the village of 33,000.
And that`s not to mention the catastrophes that might occur on the railway lines and highways running through the village. Or the 2,600 industrial facilities, many with hazardous chemicals, any one of which could be involved in a major incident.
Chemical reaction
These are all worst-case scenarios, but Elk Grove Village isn`t ruling out any of them. So it rehearses some of the possibilities.
On a recent, brilliantly sunny Saturday morning, the village ran Operation Tailspin, a realistic exercise complete with billowing smoke plume, simulating a traffic accident in an industrial park that caused a release of dangerous fumes into the air.
”What you do in playtime is what you`ll do in war,” says Bill James, explaining the need for realism, his two-way radio crackling in the background. He is the village`s administrative assistant for civil defense and the exercise`s coordinator.
Grubman came onto the scene as an observer, driving her state car, a tan station wagon festooned with five radio antennas, past police lines.
”This isn`t a disaster until a lot of people are affected,” she says. Only five vehicles were involved in the accident, so the casualties, dummies in this case, were light.
Grubman left the accident scene to lend assistance, if needed, at the village`s emergency operations center, located at the fire station. There, village officials were arriving to monitor the event. Due to a problem with the new paging system, some officials couldn`t be contacted until well into the exercise. ”That`s why we have these exercises, to find out about problems like that,” says James.
The accident occurred at 10:19 a.m. At 1:30, the fire chief at the command post still didn`t know precisely what chemical had spewed into the air. He kept referring to it generically as ”poison.” ”You`d think he`d know by now,” says Grubman, critiquing the drill for a listener. ”It really shouldn`t take this long to find out.”
The problem, as it turned out, was communication. The officials in the field weren`t providing as many details as they could have, and those at the command center weren`t asking all the right questions, says James. ”More practice will solve that,” he says.
It turned out several chemicals were involved in the incident:
hydrochloric and formic acids, lithium oxide and potassium cyanide.
The acids escaped into the air and, when the wind shifted, some of the village`s 10,000 industrial workers had to be ”evacuated.”
That`s where realism ended. Disaster planners don`t want to take the chance of panicking the public by actually practicing an evacuation, so they just pretend on that end.
Despite the minor flaws, Grubman gives Elk Grove Village high marks for readiness. ”If something happened, they`d know what to do,” she says.
