What role is there for railroads in evacuations?

When Irma was approaching the Florida Keys and had every intention of battering the entire state of Florida, my son asked me a question. “Why,” he said, “don’t they just run every Amtrak train they can find into Florida to evacuate as many people as they could. Wouldn’t that be better than the traffic jams on the Interstates?”

Well, that’s actually two questions, but you get the idea.

My son is not a train-crazy thirteen-year-old, but a savvy adult who has an excellent analytical technical mind. He is interested in trains and railroads. I know he reads this blog. It was an honest question.

I realized while giving the answer that it highlighted the dismal state of affairs of transportation in America. Not just Amtrak and/or railroads, but all kinds of transportation. My answer? Amtrak just doesn’t have enough equipment to make a dent in the several million people that needed to be evacuated.

I think he accepted this as a fair assessment of the situation, but I realized still later that there is some history and considerably more thinking of the dismal kind behind the idea of using passenger rail for evacuation.

First the history. The record shows that railroads have historically been right there on the front lines in both flood and wildfire situations. Before the advent of the diesel, with its electric drive located at axle level, steam locomotives were known to be able to operate in water deeper than what can now be traversed in high-clearance military vehicles and monster trucks. Historically, railroads often built along rivers to get the best grade, so they were no strangers to flooding.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, steam trains were known to rescue flood-stranded people and also to bring food and medical supplies in to flood ravaged areas that could not be accessed by road. Railroads have also been used to evacuate people from wildfire areas. The Great Hinckley Minnesota Fire of 1894 is an example where railroad employees took it upon themselves to move trains into areas where people had fled the flames, and where the evacuations were successful.

Since the Irma disaster, I have seen at least one commentator suggest that not railroads but highways need to be better prepared for evacuations, and I think that is a fair assessment. Thinking on the dismal side, again, my first thought is that highways are public property built with a tacit understanding that they should be available to the public to use at all times—but particularly in case of disaster evacuations. Railroads are, with some exceptions, owned by private enterprises who cannot be compelled by law to put their property at risk, and risk liability for injury and death, without some kind of compensation, or limit of liability.

Railroad equipment is expensive, and passenger equipment even more so when compared with most freight cars. I think that even public agencies are loath to put equipment at risk. If equipment is stranded in a flood or storm zone, it almost certainly will be out of commission for months, if not years. If a transit agency loses the ability to meet its schedules after a storm, there will be an immediate consequence in delay of recovery, and a long lasting economic consequence, not just to the agency, but to all those people who can’t get to their work and all employers who depend on those people to conduct business.

The hippo on the table, however, it this: No potential flood or storm area in these United States is as sparsely populated as was Louisiana during the great Mississippi floods of the 1800s or Minnesota in 1894. Population keeps pushing its way into areas that never had to be evacuated before, and government pretty much lets them, ignoring development on flood plains, or providing inadequate insurance that doesn’t even address how the property owners are going to save themselves, let alone pay for property damage.

So, we come back to my original answer. No railroad today could provide enough railroad cars to make a dent in the total number of probable evacuees. The commentator was right. Somebody needs to put up more and better superhighways that can be directionally controlled in case of disaster, and somebody needs to consider doing this very, very soon. Transportation departments; are you listening?

©2017 – C. A. Turek – mistertrains@gmail.com

(Charles A. Turek is a writer and novelist based in Albuquerque, NM. After four decades working in areas of the insurance industry related to transportation, he now writes on all aspects of American railroading. Charles is a political conservative but believes in public funding of passenger rail as a part of the federal government’s constitutionally conservative obligation to provide for defense and public infrastructure so that private enterprise may flourish.)