This is my real-world experience supplement to, or part of my background for the hypothetical Escape from Bureaupolis scenario.
There had been a severe ice storm overnight, but we had not lost power, or not for long, anyway. It was no longer precipitating and accumulating, the weather forecast was good from then on, and it seemed like conditions would only be improving.
I knew that there was a lot of ice but made the decision to go into work, and to leave as early as possible. I don’t know if it’s like this in other areas of the country, but here in foul weather the biggest danger by far is not the ice or snow but other drivers.
The first thing I noticed while driving out of our neighborhood in the still-mostly-dark was that the power was out for a lot of our neighbors just blocks away, and for a lot of other neighborhoods. The first traffic light I hit was dark, but there was nobody around. The second light, in a much bigger intersection, was down- literally down, the cables that strung the light across the intersection had failed and the lights themselves were scattered around on the road. Still nobody around, so I carefully drove around the fallen lights and toward town.
There was sheet ice on the major road, but moving slowly and carefully I made it the 25 miles to the subway station without incident, only seeing one or two other cars along the way, which is very strange for this area.
I got to the multi-story subway parking lot I used. The lights were all out on the inside, but it was open on the sides and there was enough light to see. There were already a scattering of cars parked there. It was a little creepy getting out of the vehicle in a very dark building, and creepier still in the dark concrete stairwells, but not a big deal.
When I walked up to the entrance to the subway, though, the stairs and escalators, they had it all roped off and there were signs saying that we should go to the entrance on the other side of the main road, where there was no parking lot, or rather just a very small short-term lot where there were signs threatening to tow anyone there longer. That was a problem, it meant crossing the main road, four lanes divided with regular supplementary turning lanes, on sheet ice, in traffic. Not much traffic, but it was picking up, and it seemed that if anyone had to brake for you they would likely hit the brakes but probably wouldn’t slow much at all. Nor was the footing good on the sheet ice over the pavement. By now more people were beginning to accumulate on foot in the area.
Some elected to walk about two-and-a-half blocks down the road to where there was a crosswalk, but of course the light at the crosswalk was out, and the few cars going through didn’t seem to slow for it much, if at all. I could see why the pedestrians would choose that route, though- this area has a penchant for discouraging people on foot as much as possible, and on the other side of the road between the curb and the sidewalk there was, inexplicably, a low, seemingly ornamental wrought-iron fence. So the choice was to cross here with no crosswalk and try to get over the fence, or to go blocks out of the way and cross where there was still no light.
There were few cars, and though I had no confidence in their ability to stop there were long lulls with none coming, so I elected to cross there, and managed to clamber over the low ice-coated wrought-iron fence without ripping my pants open, which is the typical hazard of such maneuvers in dress clothes. On this side of the road the station entrance was open, no signs at all, but dark, no lights on and the escalators not working, no transit employees to be found anywhere.
After that, the rest of my trip into work was uneventful. The trains themselves seemed to be running as usual (their power rail is not on the local grids) and the walk into work from the station was pretty much normal, sidewalks in the city had been sanded and salted. Inside work, at my desk, everything was normal save for the fact that it we were a skeleton crew, a lot of people had elected to stay home.
During the course of that day I monitored a small radio and the web for the conditions on the subway, and by early afternoon they were getting ominous. There were station closings- none of stations that I used yet, but they were increasing. Apparently the problem was that while the third/power rail for the trains was not on the local grids, the water pumps that kept the underground stations from flooding with ground water were, and there was still no power to many stations, so as the water level approached that 750-volt rail they had to shut it down.
Seemed like they could have mentioned that little fact earlier, when we were deciding whether to come into work.
I decided to leave. It was mid-afternoon.
Although I was getting a bit anxious about it, the trip home started off well enough. There was power to the stations downtown, just not out in the suburbs, and the crowds were beginning to look normal. The trip was uneventful until I was most of the way back to my station, then things slowed, and the train stopped a couple of times. Eventually the train operator announced that all the stations further out were closed, and that we’d all have to get out at a station a few stops short of mine where there would be a free shuttle bus to run us to the next station.
Right off this made zero sense, my vehicle was not at the next station, what exactly was I supposed to do to get the rest of the way?
When we approached the final station for this ride it was clear that the local power was out, there was some dim emergency lighting but it was still pretty dark. They flashed the lights on the train, and suddenly the PA system that was normally barely intelligible was much louder and clear, we were to GET OUT HERE. We did, into the dark station, and the train immediately took off leaving us there. There was very little light and it was dead quiet. There were no transit employees around anywhere, we were apparently completely alone. I ended up guiding some ladies out, being the only one around who seemed to have a flashlight. We all exited out into the sidewalk at the edge of a paved parking lot, nothing there, no buses of any kind, so everyone just stood and waited.
And waited.
And waited.
There were maybe seventy or seventy-five of us there, all of us from the same train, arrayed along the sidewalk. Some of us struck up conversations with others. One guy I talked to had the same concern, his vehicle was at the same station as mine.
And we waited.
Suddenly more people were appearing on the sidwalk, and I realized another train had unloaded below. There was nothing happening above ground, so I went down into the station again with my flashlight to see if anyone needed help in the dark. By the time I got to the platform it was pretty much empty, if anyone had needed help I was too late. There were still no transit employees around anywhere, other than us the station was completely deserted.
I went back up the stairs into the light, now there were 150-200 people on the sidewalk, still no sign of any shuttle-bus.
And we waited.
In time, one more load of passengers appeared. Each load of passengers was bigger than the last, more people trying to get out of downtown, so the crowd was groing fast. I figured something like 300 people. The sidewalk was now packed.
A police car showed up, drove to the far side of the paved parking lot, just about as distant from the crowd as it could get, fired up a PA system and announced that the transit authority had been informed that we were there- as if they naturally could not know, otherwise- and that there was a shuttle-bus coming. The police car promptly left, and it was just us passengers again. By now I was pretty sure we were in trouble, I’ve never seen a bus that could hold 300 people, and, again, my vehicle was not even at the next station that they kept telling us that someday they were going to supply free transportation to.
There didn’t seem to be many options, though, so there I stood, along the curb on the sidewalk, pretty much in the thick of the crowd. It had been almost two hours since we’d arrived there.
Eventually a shuttle-bus did show up. It was very small, one that would hold maybe 20 people. By sheerest chance, as far as I know, it pulled up right in front of me on the sidewalk and opened the door, and I had only one person in front of me getting on.
Inside was a hostile woman driver, and almost immediately she and the person in front of me were shouting at each other and getting very loud. Apparently nobody had told her that the shuttle bus was supposed to be free for us, and she was determined that none of the 300+ people on the sidewalk was getting on her bus without paying first. Nothing moved, the shouting continued.
This went on for a little while and I just stood there on the step into the bus listening to it. Apparently the lady would not take cash, you had to have a printed transfer or card of some sort. It was clear that even if this was resolved that little bus wasn’t going to make a dent in the huge crowd. The people immediately around me were angrily shouting that they were promised that the ride would be free, but people back further in the crowd were starting to angrily shout that they were willing to pay, had whatever they needed, and if we did not we should damn well get out of their way. Everyone knew that the the bus was hopelessly inadequate, and I also knew that the best I could hope for was getting from there to the next station, where, if I was lucky, I might eventually get onto another shuttle-bus to take me to the next station beyond that- which was still short of the station where my vehicle was parked.
I was still on the shuttle-bus step looking over the increasingly angry crowd behind me when I caught sight of one of the guys that I’d struck up a conversation with earlier waving me over toward him, away from the commotion. Since it seemed like this could turn into a riot at any moment, and some of it was directed at me for not either getting on the bus (couldn’t, the person in front of me in line was still arguing with the driver) or getting out of the way (and giving up any hope of getting out of there soon). Discretion seemed the better part of valor and I stepped away from the bus and walked toward the passenger gesturing at me.
Together we walked further to the edge of the crowd where he could make himself heard, and told me that he and a couple of others had sent yet another of their number on a walk a few blocks out to the main road from the station to try to hail a cab and bring it back. There was still a large, mostly-empty parking lot, so we could get some distance from the crowd and hopefully get in the cab and be gone before they realized that we were leaving.
It was a good plan, and it worked just as we’d hoped and faster than I’d thought it might. We got out of there, and I have no idea what happened in the crowd after we left, I never heard.
Nobody had mentioned money, apparently it was just taken for granted that we’d split the fare and tip, so I was glad that I had plenty of cash on me, not for the first time. There were four of us, the ride wasn’t that long, I put $20 into the pool, more than enough. It would have been a bad moment to have only credit cards.
When the cab pulled up into the station where our vehicles were we encountered the first transit employees that we’d seen since being told to get off the train- two guys came running out and tried to hold the cab doors closed and keep us from exiting, yelling at us that the station was closed. Gee, thanks, that’s very helpful. We had to lower the windows and yell back at them that our cars were in the parking lot, it took a couple of tries to make ourselves understood, apparently they really didn’t want to hear it, but we exited anyway. That seemed to make one of them angry but he walked away.
That’s pretty much the end of the story, it only took me maybe an extra two-and-a-half hours and $20 to get home that day, many hours after the storm had ended. In retrospect it would have been a whole lot faster, easier, safer and maybe even cheaper to have just taken a cab all the way from downtown out the suburb where my vehicle was parked, if I’d had any idea what was going to happen.
Even in those circumstances it could easily have been much worse, and nearly was.
What really sticks in my mind, though, and I suspect it always will, was the incredible level of bureaucratic ineptitude and negligence displayed in what was a very minor disturbance in routine, just an ice storm and some local power outages with no real damage to equipment. That’s all it took for them to abandon their stations, abandon trainloads of stranded passengers, and those few transit employees who stayed clearly had no idea what was going on or what they were supposed to do. It came down to people helping each other.
Imagine what it would be like in a real emergency. Imagine hundreds or thousands, or more, looking to people like this for medical help, or emergency shelter, or, heaven forbid, to run an evacuation or a refugee camp.
Never, never rely on the bureaucracy to help when the chips are down.
Many years later I was working in another Federal building downtown. In the course of my being there we had several building evacuations, sometimes announced drills, at least once I think it was an un-announced drill, and sometimes fire alarms, either false alarms or limited incidents. In the office kitchen near my desk at work they had a bulletin board with the evacuation procedures posted on it, we were to proceed to a nearby little park (too nearby, for a real disaster) to a particular landmark and there we would be checked off by a government employee whose responsibility it was to make sure that everyone was safely out of the building. There were several such, each responsible for a small number, and they had their names and color photos reproduced on the instruction sheets.
I never, ever met the guy, never saw him. Each time we evacuated the building I and several others dutifully went to the designated spot, he never once showed up.
Nobody ever followed up, nobody cared.
Actually, I had a similar feeling a few years earlier than that, but still years after the ice storm. That time I was working out in the suburbs, same Federal Government, different agency. The government employees had all the window offices around the perimeter of the floor, we “worker bees” were in a cubicle farm in the center, so we didn’t get much of a view, but one day it got dark enough to be noticeable even there under the ever-present fluorescent lights. Then the power went out, and a couple of minutes later someone announced that there was a tornado warning, and that we were all to stop working immediately and gather in a center room away from the windows.
The government had apparently paid for “emergency” flashlights, they were plugged into wall outlets in various places to keep them charged, but apparently they were old NiCad technology, so when the time came that they were needed of course they were very, very dead, barely a glow out of the few- of course- incandescent bulbs. So we were herded into a large, windowless, dark room. Out of perhaps 75 people there that day there was exactly one that had a flashlight, a very bright, modern LED unit- yours truly.
While we were waiting for the tornado to hit us or not, someone started a roll call to make sure that everyone was accounted for. A little over half-way through the roll call they stopped and told us that the list only included government employees, not contractors, they didn’t have a list for us, sorry.
Interestingly, it wasn’t true. There HAD been contracting company employees among the names that were called out, including my “bosses”, but only management.
Hey, with an impending tornado you have to take care of what’s really important. Guess that put us in our place.
– Robert the Wombat