Under the present plan, the idea would be to evacuate those people to nearly every other part of Washington. Following them on the FEMA list are urban areas with populations of 50,000 or more.Ībout 2.3 million people live in the Puget Sound area. Next come key military facilities and defense industries: Tacoma's Fort Lewis, the Bremerton Naval Shipyards on Puget Sound, and Seattle's vast Boeing aircraft works. FEMA ranks the entire Puget Sound area, with its many defense-related industries, as the highest-risk area in the region, and among the nation's top ''hot spots.'' It could thus serve as a model for the way evacuation would proceed.įEMA rates sites such as the Trident submarine base at Bangor, across Puget Sound from Seattle, and the McChord Air Force Base near Tacoma as the most likely targets of enemy attack. These local emergency chiefs - in some cases merely county sheriffs - form the ''front line'' that would manage any evacuation.Įarlier this year FEMA announced its still-unfinished emergency plans for the Northwest. Since 1979, FEMA has worked quietly on evacuation plans with government officials in high-risk areas, and in the ''host'' areas where evacuees would be sent. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is charged with planning and coordinating ways to counter various possible disasters - especially nuclear attack. Or, in the federal jargon, to ''crisis relocation.'' The new goal of civil defense: to evacuate high-risk cities and strategic areas to the countryside. In 19, the watchword in civil defense shifted from dig-a-hole to head-for-the-hills. That doesn't mean a revival of the fallout-shelter mania of the 1950s, however. The federal government will spend $128 million for civil defense this year. Government policymakers had never abandoned it. And civil-defense planning is back - or rather, back in the limelight. Now, with hopes for a nuclear arms reduction treaty languishing, the US is embarking on a sweeping new program of strategic rearmament. The reason: an estimated $70 billion to $120 billion price tag. The original US strategy for nuclear-war survival - dig shelters to house the population - was largely discarded in the 1960s and '70s as impractical. For more than a decade, it has been easy to think of civil defense in the past tense.
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