Evacuation, shelter-in-place and reception centres

The bus carrying the first twenty-two residents of Riverside Seniors Residence pulled away from the front door at 00:58 on June 23, escorted by a patrol car. Marco DiSanto, one of the students, knows the residence well; his grandmother lived there until last year. He asks Kowal how the city decided to move a building full of frail older people in the middle of the night, in the rain, when the water had not yet reached the building. 'Because by the time the water reaches the building, it's too late,' Kowal says. 'The residence is at the lowest point on Riverside Drive. Moving sixty-four people, eleven of them in wheelchairs and two on oxygen, takes two hours on a good day. Our flood plan said that if the creek forecast passed a certain level, the residence moves first. It passed that level at 23:45.'

Evacuation is one of the most common and most consequential actions in an emergency. Done well, it saves lives at modest cost. Done badly, or too late, it can put people in more danger than staying put, cause injuries during the move, separate families and destroy trust in the next warning. This lesson covers how evacuation decisions are made, how evacuations are carried out, the alternative of sheltering in place, and the reception centres and shelters that receive people who leave.

Evacuate or shelter in place?

The first decision is whether moving people is safer than keeping them where they are. For a flood, a wildfire or a building collapse, leaving is usually safer, as long as there is time and a safe route. For a short-lived release of a toxic gas, staying indoors with windows and doors closed and ventilation off is often safer than going outside into the cloud. For a severe storm or tornado, people should take shelter where they are, in a basement or interior room, rather than trying to drive away.

Decision-makers weigh several factors: the nature of the hazard and how fast it is moving; how long it will last; whether there are safe routes and enough time to use them; the number and needs of the people affected; the weather and time of day; and what the experts at the scene advise. The decision is often made by the incident commander for the immediate area, with the head of council or other officials ordering larger evacuations under emergency powers. Police seldom make the decision alone, but officers are often the first to recognize that people need to move, and the first officer on scene may have to order an immediate evacuation of a few buildings before anyone more senior arrives.

Kinds of evacuation

Evacuations are often described by how urgent and how compulsory they are. A precautionary evacuation is recommended before the hazard arrives, when it is likely but not certain; it gives people more time and makes the later work easier. An ordered or mandatory evacuation is directed by an official with legal authority. In practice, the difference between the two is often less than the words suggest. Even under an order, police rarely remove adults from their homes by force, as the previous lessons discussed, and some people leave after a recommendation who would not leave after an order. What matters most is that the message is clear about the danger and about what will happen if people stay, for example that rescue may not be possible.

Evacuations also differ in scale: a single building, a block, a neighbourhood, a whole town. Ontario has evacuated entire communities several times in recent years, most often First Nations in the north threatened by wildfire smoke or spring flooding, sometimes moving thousands of people by air to host communities in the south.

Phases of an evacuation

Most evacuations move through the same phases: the decision; alerting and notification; movement; reception and shelter; and, eventually, return. Each phase has police tasks.

In the warning phase, police help notify residents, as the last lesson described. In the movement phase, police control traffic on evacuation routes, keep routes open for emergency vehicles, escort buses, direct drivers away from hazards and deal with breakdowns and collisions. In the reception phase, police provide security at reception centres and shelters and help with inquiries about missing people. And while the area is empty, police patrol it to prevent theft and keep people out of danger. On return, police manage access, often checking identification so that only residents and authorized workers enter.

The evacuation of Riverside Flats used four teams of officers and firefighters working through four divisions, each with a leader reporting to the evacuation group supervisor. Before the teams started, the planning section printed a list of every address in the zone. Each team recorded the result at each door. The group supervisor reported totals to the command post every thirty minutes.

The estimate of about two and a half hours matched what happened: the teams reported every address checked at 02:31. Kowal notes that six minutes a door is an average. Some doors took thirty seconds because nobody was home and the house was dark; one took twenty-five minutes because an older couple needed help finding medication and packing a bag for their cat. Planners use averages, but supervisors should expect wide variation.

People who need help to leave

The people most at risk in an evacuation are often those least able to leave on their own: older adults, people with disabilities or serious illnesses, people without cars, children in schools and daycares, people in hospitals, care homes and correctional facilities, people experiencing homelessness, and visitors who do not know the area. Good plans identify them in advance. Port Ardent's plan lists every care facility in each flood zone, its number of residents, their mobility needs and its own evacuation plan, and contains agreements with the regional transit service and two school bus companies to provide vehicles.

Animals matter too. Many people refuse to evacuate if they cannot take their pets, and some have died returning for them. Many Ontario municipalities now plan for pets at reception centres, often with local humane societies. Service animals must always be allowed to stay with their handlers.

Reception centres and shelters

A reception centre is where evacuees go first. It registers them, provides immediate needs such as food, water, warmth, information and first aid, and helps them find somewhere to stay, which may be with family, in a hotel or in a shelter. In Ontario this work is usually organized as emergency social services by the municipality, often with the Canadian Red Cross. Lakeview Community Centre registered 211 people on the night of the flood. Fifty-eight stayed overnight on cots in the gymnasium; the rest went to family, friends or hotels.

Registration is important for two reasons. It lets officials know who is safe, which allows police to stop searching for people who have already left. And it supports family reunification: when relatives call asking whether someone is safe, the registration and inquiry service can tell them, with the evacuee's consent. Officers who receive missing-person calls during an emergency should check the registration list before starting a search.

Police tasks at reception centres usually include security, traffic and parking, helping identify people who may need police services, and supporting inquiries about missing people. Officers should be visible and approachable. Desjardins reminds the class that many evacuees are frightened, tired and grieving, and some have reasons to be wary of police. 'You are there to help them feel safe,' he says. 'This is not the place to run warrant checks on everyone who walks in.' Port Ardent's policy, like that of many services, is that officers at reception centres do not check evacuees for outstanding warrants unless there is a specific safety concern.

Protecting the evacuated area

People who evacuate worry about their homes, and fear of looting is one of the most common reasons people give for refusing to leave. Research on disasters has repeatedly found that widespread looting is much rarer than media coverage and popular belief suggest, and that most people in disasters behave cooperatively and help one another. Theft from evacuated areas does happen, however, and visible police patrols reassure residents. During the flood, officers patrolled the dry edges of Riverside Flats on foot and by car; a property crime unit followed up three reports of thefts from sheds in the following week.

Shelter in place in practice

Sheltering in place is simple to describe and harder to do well. People should go indoors, close all windows and doors, turn off heating, ventilation and air-conditioning systems that draw in outside air, close fireplace dampers, move to an interior room above ground level if the hazard is a heavier-than-air gas, and listen to the radio or watch their phones for updates. They should not leave to pick up children from school, because schools have their own plans. When the hazard has passed, officials will tell them to open windows and go outside to air the building out, because indoor air slowly becomes contaminated during a long release.

Police may be asked to tell people to shelter in place, to keep traffic out of the affected area, and to enforce the instruction at the edges of the zone. Officers should not drive into an area where people are being told to shelter in place, because their own vehicles draw in outside air and offer little protection. Lesson 11 returns to this when it covers the gasoline tanker rollover in September.

Recording and tracking evacuees

Accounting for people is one of the hardest parts of an evacuation. During the flood, the planning section kept three lists that had to be reconciled: the addresses checked by the door-to-door teams, the people registered at Lakeview, and the people reported missing by relatives. At 04:00 the three lists left nine people unaccounted for. By 06:00 seven had been found registered with family or at hotels, one was the man with the dogs who was later rescued by boat, and one was a woman who had been in hospital the whole time. Kowal says that the reconciliation took four people two hours, and that the next version of the plan will use a shared electronic list instead of paper.