Re: Comet impact in the Eastern United States - Feasibility of Evacuation

johan.g.larson@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 schrieb:
> On Mar 9, 3:27 pm, Matthias Warkus <War...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
> wrote:
>> Matt Browne SFW schrieb:
>>
>>> Is it possible to evacuate at least 90% of the 100 million people
>>> living there?
>> Evacuating 90 million people in four weeks requires moving out three
>> million all day, every day. I think this can be done, but just barely,
>> with millions of personnel, and with lots of luck.
>>
>> Oh, and of course nobody gets to take along anything but the minimal
>> carry-on luggage. Good luck enforcing that.
> 
> The figure I came up with, just back-of-the-envelope, was 20,000
> people per hour per lane of traffic. That's guessing high; poorly
> organized traffic might be an order of magnitude slower. So we need
> between 6 and sixty lanes of traffic flowing continuously to evacuate
> all those people.
> 
> Overall, I agree with your *****sment. It's possible, but it's going
> to be tight, and keeping things moving in an orderly fa****on will be
> essential.

It might perhaps be preferable to do all the centrally organised 
evacuating by rail, as there is much less to go wrong. Also, locomotives 
are very good at pu****ng obstacles away; a train can push a broken-down 
train along up to the next siding. Top speeds should indeed be limited 
to about 15-20 kph, also to limit the damage by inevitable derailments. 
The eastern US rail network looks tight enough to do it, there is 
certainly enough rolling stock and it should be possible to find enough 
drivers.

The road network could be put to the exclusive use of ferrying evacuees 
to railheads.

mawa
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