The Orange County Commissioners accepted a $10,000 grant Tuesday from the state's public safety department to conduct a multi-county study for the region's evacuation needs in the event of a terrorist attack.
"It's to determine what the threats are, how significant the threats are and where the threats are," said Nick Waters, the county's director of emergency management services.
Waters and his staff will conduct the six-county study, which includes Johnston, Wake, Durham, Orange, Alamance and Guilford counties. All six counties lie along the Interstate 40-Interstate 85 corridor, the primary evacuation route for the region. More than 20 percent of the state's residents live in the participating counties.
The study, to be completed by the end of August, will seek to determine how an evacuation might be accomplished, how long it would take and what help local governments would be expected to give. The study also will examine ways to accommodate other counties' populations and address quarantine scenarios.
Commissioner Stephen Halkiotis blasted the state for not creating its own evacuation plan. Halkiotis likened the state's inaction to its reluctance to enact a hurricane evacuation plan for I-40. He praised Orange County's foresight "in trying to plan for something that the state has failed to do."
But Waters said that before the Sept. 11 attacks, the state and federal governments had emergency plans in place that met the lesser terrorism concerns of that time.
"The planning philosophies in the past have met the threats in the past," Waters said.
Since the attacks, nuclear power plants have been placed on heightened alert by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The Shearon Harris Nuclear Power Plant, located 30 miles southeast of Chapel Hill and operated by Carolina Power & Light Co., only has an evacuation plan for areas within a 10-mile radius of the plant.
"We just felt strongly about the need for planning," said commissioner Moses Carey. "We weren't included in CP&L's final evacuation plan."
