From "Modeling, Simulations Can Help a City Offer More Efficient Exodus"
WALL STREET JOURNAL SCIENCE JOURNAL By SHARON BEGLEY 9/30/05

"...Bottom line: If you have six lanes of freeway (of which three are contra-flow), then at 2,000 vehicles an hour per lane and 2.5 people per vehicle, you can get about 600,000 people out of a city every 24 hours. You can load more people into each car or use buses and trains, but evacuating 1.5 million souls will take two to three days. Getting people out of harm's way if there is no advance warning (after, say, a radiological bomb) is just not in the cards.

One final word of advice: motorcycle."

amen brother.

just make sure have a full tank and an extra can to strap onto the back, because you might have trouble finding gas within 200 miles of the evacuation zone.

After Katrina, Alex and I talked about how prepared we were for an earthquake. We're not. Are any of you? We kept saying we would go through one of the zillion checklists you can find on the web, but I guess we're optimists or just lazy, so we haven't done anything about it.

AND with Alex in his casts, there's no way of getting him on a motorcycle... Hopefully there won't be any need to evacuate before he recovers. :o

annie
been away and just noticed your EQ preparedness post. we are prepped to some degree. this is the result of being assigned, as a reporter years ago, to write about EQ issues. when you get into it, the forecasts of the inevitable are fairly scary (and you'll NEVER want to consider buying property in mammoth; downtown san francisco has some really alarming special problems).
the stock advice from the state emergency prep office is that everyone in an EQ zone should be able to live in the rubble of their home, without help, for at least 72 hours.
we have big rubber, sealable, trashcans outside the house but protected (under eave on patio and in garage) filled with dried or canned food, radio, batteries, little TV, space blankets, med supplies, spare prescription drugs needed, etc. we also have commercially available "all in one" kits stuck in the luggage space of both cars. we have several 5-gallon water bottles (the kind or office type coolers) in the garage, along with a 3-gallon can of gas.
I'll pass along one recommendation from a distinguished seismologist, I got into the habit of asking these guys, at the end of the interview, what precautions they personally take. amazingly, one guy high up in the state emergency office said he had done nothing--he kept procrastinating. even though part of his job was running the PR program with the 72-hour warning.)
the DS said he always kept a pair of shoes he could easily slip into beside his bed at night. I asked why and he replied "because when it happens, I'll be running for my life through a house filled with broken glass."
I have had a pair of lug-sole timberlands that I could slip into on the run and live in for a week or two next to the bed ever since.
terry