There’s an excellent account of the flotilla of boats that converged on Lower Manhattan on September 11 2001 to assist with the evacuation of nearly half a million people here (see also earlier post here). The authors note:
Although some thought had been given to circumstances that might require evacuation via bridges and tunnels around Manhattan, there had been no planning for this scale and kind of organizational activity. No group was responsible for making such an activity a central part of its disaster planning. No organization or official was in complete charge of the overall emergent evacuation activities. Who went where, where evacuees were disembarked in New Jersey or Staten Island, and how long any vessel operated, were decisions often made independently by the multiple operators of different vessels who had little direct communication with one another or agencies elsewhere.
But, they continue, this didn’t present a problem; the opposite was the case.
The kind of emergent behavior shown in the evacuation was in an important sense familiar to veteran disaster researchers. Studies of evacuation at times of crises, which have now been undertaken for 50 years, have consistently shown that at times of great crises, much of the organized behavior is emergent rather than traditional. In addition, emergent evacuation is often decentralized, with the dominance of pluralistic decision making and the appearance of imaginative and innovative new attempts to cope with the contingencies that typically appear in major disasters. Fortunately, on September 11 no attempts were made to impose a command and control model on the evacuation by water transport from lower Manhattan.
