The 1-10-100 Rule of Disaster Evacuations

When a major catastrophe hits, is the hazard itself the real danger—or is it the traffic jam created by everyone fleeing at the exact same moment? 

In this premier episode of Dismantling Disaster, we break down the brutal psychology and logistics of evacuation gridlock. From surviving the eerie, silent prelude to Hurricane Gustav in Louisiana to navigating the infamous 53-hour "Carmageddon" highway shutdown in Los Angeles, we look at why human evacuation plans consistently fail.

Discover why relying on celebrities or neighbors to cue your evacuation is a catastrophic mistake, how to implement the "1-10-100 Rule" to secure distinct safety anchors, and the counterintuitive reason why evacuating TOWARD your workplace might just save your life. 

If you want to survive the next unpredictable wildfire or climate emergency, you have to learn to read the flow of traffic, anticipate human panic, and engineer your own way out. 

Inside this episode:
00:00 - The Los Angeles Traffic Problem & The 405 Matrix
01:30 - Is the Disaster the Real Threat, or is it the Gridlock?
02:15 - The Day the Insects Left: Lessons from Hurricane Gustav
03:50 - The Celebrity Calculus: The Trap of Waiting for Others to Evacuate
04:52 - Inside "Carmageddon" and the Reality of Highway Compliance
06:05 - Decoupling the Highway: How Contraflow Works (And Where It Fails)
07:15 - The 1-10-100 Rule: Mapping Your 3 Levels of Evacuation
08:25 - The Office Anchor: Why Your Workplace is an Ideal Disaster Shelter
09:40 - Surviving the 120 MPH DC Derecho Inside FEMA Headquarters
11:20 - Outsmarting the Flow: Buying Time When Driving Away is Impossible

Make sure you are subscribed to the channel to catch our multi-part series testing real-world disaster engineering, including our upcoming lab-test of a wildfire shelter built entirely out of school supplies!

Empowerment Architecture means refusing to follow the crowd to a standstill. Prepare for a disaster, and you'll never experience one.

#DismantlingDisaster #DisasterPatrick #EvacuationLogistics #EmergencyManagement #SurvivalStrategy #TrafficScience #110100Rule

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:29

In July of 2011, Los Angeles was gonna have a bit of a problem because it was gonna have to close down the 405 freeway for 53 straight hours. And I grew up near Los Angeles, I grew up a little south of there in Orange County, and I will tell you that Los Angeles has a bit of a traffic problem. It's got traffic from all over the place, it's notorious. Anytime you're trying to go downtown, you are gonna fight traffic. There are hours, and my father used to work in LA, when he would drive, it took him like an hour and 45 minutes to get to work. And it was okay because my dad really enjoyed those moments of solitude, but for pretty much everyone else, it was a slog. It was awful. And traffic has never improved. In fact, it's actually gotten worse, including in Orange County, which has grown in population. So the traffic has now gotten worse and worse even south of LA, which has contributed to it. So the point of it is how do we deal with traffic in a disaster? So the question we ask is: is the disaster really the disaster, or is it traffic that ends up being the real disaster? Because during the Palisades fire, we saw long lines of people trying to evacuate, and there are a lot of different areas in LA where it seems like you'd be able to access like 10 freeways immediately. The problem is that everyone else has that exact same idea. So all the on-ramps are blocked, the off-ramps are blocked, everything is congested, side streets, everyone's thought of that. There is no exception. Everyone has figured out every single way to get out. And so what happens is the traffic ends up getting to a more and more of a stall as it goes along. And the LA wildfires and disasters, generally speaking, when they occur, particularly natural disasters like hurricanes and tornadoes, they exacerbate, they make worse the traffic in a particular area. So right after I graduated college, I was living in Orange County and then I moved to Louisiana. And I did that in the wake of Hurricane Katrina because I thought, you know, if I'm gonna become a disaster professional, this would be the time to do it. This would be the chance because it's obvious that mercy management is now at a crossroads, and there are so many things that are gonna have to change and they're gonna come out of this. In September of 2008, Bat Rouge was slated to get a hurricane. And if you don't know where Baton Rouge is, New Orleans is right by the coast. So when the hurricanes hit, they tend to come from the south, so they move into a place called Grand Isle, Louisiana, which is inevitably always the first place that gets hit by a hurricane because it is the southernmost position in Louisiana, and then the hurricane continues to move north, and then there's Baton Rouge, which are is 40, 50, 60 miles away. But in 2008, it was slated, the hurricane was slated to go right by New Orleans, and it was going to hit Baton Rouge directly, and that was extremely unusual. And so I'll I never I'll never forget the night before the hurricane made landfall in Baton Rouge. Now, if you've never been to Louisiana, if you've never been there, let me give you a little bit of information about it. There are a lot of insects. There are a lot, a lot, a lot of insects. Because Louisiana's in a swamp. I mean, that's not that's not really top secret information. And so when you go to Louisiana, is it inevitably humid? Absolutely. Is it hot? Absolutely. And there's no accompanying wind most of the time. And then you get hurricanes and you get like 120 mile an hour winds. But the night before the hurricane struck, and that hurricane was Hurricane Gustave. And so the evening before the hurricane made landfall, the evening before the hurricane was slated to strike Baton Rouge, I stepped outside of the place I was living, I was living in a condo, and I happened to step outside, and I was just listening for things. I was just seeing what preparations people were doing, and I noticed something. It was completely silent. Totally silent outside. I'd never seen anything like it before. It was completely and totally quiet. There was nothing else going on, nothing at all. Zero. There were no insects buzzing, there were no mosquitoes around, which that seemed very strange. There was just, it was just completely quiet because there's always, in the evening times, particularly as you get towards summer, when you're in Louisiana, you get these this constant buzzing sound right around the time when it's about to get dark. And so there's always this ubiquitous buzzing everywhere you go. But the night before the hurricane, there wasn't anything. It was just completely and totally silent. And it's because it was pretty clear the insects knew when to evacuate. They knew when it was time to leave. They had determined that in advance. And if only the rest of us could remember that, if us humans could adopt that, because so many times when we have a natural catastrophe that's about to strike an area, all of us are like, whoa. We know it's about to happen. We have satellites that are in geostationary orbit. We have Doppler radars, we have people on the ground, we have social, we have all these people who could potentially warn us, and yet we still don't leave. And yet we still don't leave our home on time. Now, during the wildfires, during the Palisade and Eden fire in January of 2025, we had the same exact problem. People didn't leave early enough, so you saw traffic jams, you saw people who simply couldn't get away. There were some people who just decided it's not even worth it to try. They were just gonna stay in their house. One of the things I tell people constantly is I say, evacuations are ultimately up to you. Evacuations are your decisions and your decisions only. So when you decide to evacuate, that's the time to evacuate. But we forget that, right? Because we are expecting some celebrity to tell us to evacuate, because you know what? That's when they're evacuating. I have worked with high net worth clients, I've worked with a lot of people who are in the high net worth bracket, who are high-level professionals, people who run businesses. I worked with high-level CEOs. And even they will go online and they will see if other celebrities are leaving. And they use that as a calculus, whether they should evacuate or not. And so what we have to remember is that that's not the right time when we are waiting for everyone else to leave. That's not the time to leave. We have to make those decisions completely independently. We have to know all those of that stuff. Now, during that 53-hour block in July of 2011, when Los Angeles decided that it was gonna have to close off the 405, what they were actually doing was they were gonna demolish a bridge, and that was gonna take a full 53 hours. So uh going back to LA, you can imagine what was gonna happen if there isn't this block of freeway available, right? So they called it Carmageddon. That's the name they gave to it. They called it Carmageddon. And they called it Carmageddon because Los Angeles realized that if everybody got on the freeway, if everybody decided it was time to get on the freeway at the same time, it was gonna be a complete mess. So this is what LA did. I was watching the news conference. They had a news conference a few days before. They'd been warning people for weeks and months up to this point. But what they decided to do was they were to they were gonna have this press conference, and the mayor was there, the mayor was talking, and they had the usual guys in the uniforms and badges next to him, flanking him on both sides. He was telling people how you have to stay off the freeway as much as you possibly can. He was telling people you need to stay away, you need to try to take maybe a vacation out of town, which I thought was interesting. He said you could go up or down the coast, but just don't be in LA because we are anticipating there's gonna be a massive traffic jam, everybody's going to get stuck. And one of the things that happened was he said something interesting that has stuck with me. He said, if you get stuck in this traffic jam, if you decide that you want to get on the freeway, we will come and get you. We will come and snatch you out of your car if necessary to get you out of there. We will rescue you. We will do that no matter what. And that struck a lot of emergency professionals as strange because you would think that you would block the freeways off, but what they realized was a lot of people, because I asked some of the emergency professionals afterwards, the reason was because even though they blocked off portions of the freeway, they realized that there were gonna be people who were gonna blow the cones. They were actually gonna go on the freeway anyway, no matter what. That there were people who would even ignore the alerts altogether and just try to continue to commute. I don't know why anyone would even remotely attempt that, but they were gonna. They were gonna do that. And I don't know why you would do it. Because when we decide that we're going to evacuate during a disaster, I don't know why you would try to evacuate towards the disaster. You'd think you'd try to go the other direction. So in the South, when there's a major hurricane and you're not smart like the insects, and you're staying in place, or you decide you're gonna evacuate late and you're gonna try to fight the traffic, in the south they have something called contra flow. And I talk about it in one of the other videos for this wildfire shelter because it is so important to understand how contraflow is going to work, and that's what they call it. They call it contraflow. So, what contra flow is is they essentially have a freeway. Okay, so we have a freeway, and what happens is that the freeway will have four lanes going one direction and four lanes going the opposite direction. So, like in the south, they have the ten freeway. And the ten freeway is a major artery, it runs, actually runs from Santa Monica, interestingly enough, all the way to Florida. And I've driven it the entire way. I've actually done that before. And when you're driving on the 10, as I said, it'll be four lanes. The one when the 10 is near Louisiana and it goes through the it it splits Louisiana almost in half. And you take the 10, it goes around New Orleans, and you can drive it the entire way, and there's like four lanes one way, four lanes the other way, because it's really sparse, but there's a lot of people who are essentially driving from like Florida to New Orleans or somewhere in between. So they want to make sure they have enough room there so that it doesn't get clogged up because it is the middle of nowhere. It really is. You'll go on the 10, for example, you get out of uh you get out of Louisiana, and then the 10, you see some towns in Mississippi, and then a little bit, and then there's long stretches when you're driving, you're almost getting to Mobile, Alabama, where it is totally blank. There's nobody around. There's nobody around at all. So here's what they do. So when Florida, say, has a massive hurricane, or when Louisiana does, they will then take that freeway and they will convert both sides into a single direction freeway. So if, so let's say it was in Florida and they had everybody on the freeway, they were trying to get as many people out as possible, what they'll do is that they will convert both of the west, both of the freeway lanes, so the eastbound lane and the westbound lane will then become westbound lanes. And you'll be able to go into the other direction because they they realize that people, there's gonna be so many cars, we're so reliant on cars, that we have to, that's the only really the way out if you're going to do that, if you're gonna evacuate ahead of the hurricane-making landfall. And during even instances where you have disasters that are well telegraphed, the hurricane hurricanes are well telegraphed. I've even seen them in blizzards before where they've done contra flow, where they literally will take two lanes and tell people, go south. Find a way out. But one of the problems is I hear this all the time from people, when I'm talking to them about evacuations, they go, Well, where will I go? I don't know where I'm supposed to go. I have no idea. And so what I turn to them and say is I say, you've got to follow a rule that I've set up. I do this with all my clients. I tell them all the time, you need to have an evacuation location within one mile, ten miles, and a hundred miles. The one, ten hundred rule. That's what I use with them. And that helps them because it helps them to give an idea of okay, if there's a disaster that maybe just affects my home, I don't have to drive 80 miles away. I can just drive one mile away. Or if there's a disaster where maybe that that first location is available, or maybe there's a disaster that that sort of impacts the immediate surrounding area, I have another place to go 10 miles away. I can go 10 miles away. And then if you have a massive catastrophic emergency like an earthquake, like a hurricane, like a blizzard, then you have somewhere we can go that's over a hundred miles away. But one of the things we need to do is we need to remember that when we are evaluating evacuation options, that if everyone else is moving in a single direction or we have experience in going a single direction, then maybe we need to find another place to go. Another direction. Because what happens is even when you have contra flow, you still will get massive traffic jams. There is no doubt about it. And they will actually leave open, usually they'll they'll leave the shoulders open. And sometimes they'll even leave a lane open going towards the emergency because emergency vehicles need to move that direction. In Los Angeles, I can't tell you the number of times I'll be in the hill, I'll be in the hills and there'll be an emergency because I'll be working with a client, and then everyone's trying to take these little roads that sort of funnel to the freeway. Yes, the freeway has plenty of room, but the roads leading up to it have stoplights along the way. And it holds us up and it prevents us from being able to get out. So when we're evaluating evacuation options, when we think about going one way, maybe toward the freeway, maybe we should find an alternate option that doesn't require the freeway. Maybe we need to find a way to get to a different location than maybe we were initially anticipating. Because we realize that the freeway is going to be jammed up, or maybe we live in a location where it's really hard to get there, there's a lot of people on the roads. When we have those situations, then we've got to find maybe an alternate direction. That will impact the decisions that we make of where we go in an evacuation. And that's why when I work with my clients, I'm always talking to them about can you evacuate to your workplace? Can you do that? A lot of people don't realize that yes, we actually can evacuate to our workplaces. That absolutely can be done. And evacuating to your workplace can be a really good idea. You have availability there, especially if it's out of the area, the immediate area, you're gonna have air conditioning, you're going to have all the amenities. There's even a little kitchenette I've worked in in when I was a consultant, I would be going, I'd work from office to office to office to office, and I didn't want to eat out all the time. So I used to bring food, and they would always have a little place where I could microwave some things, I could cook a little stuff, it was really easy, ready-made food, and then I could immediately eat it without having tons of calories every single place I would go. And when we evaluate those different options, it gives us a chance to avoid the possible stickiness that comes with trying to evacuate along with everybody else. That's why when I work with my clients, I say we need to evaluate multiple, multiple backup options for you. Don't just say I'm gonna go to this hotel. Well, you're going to this hotel, and so are 50,000 other people, and they don't have room for 50,000 people. And then what ends up happening is now you gotta turn around, now we have to go somewhere else, and that creates an even bigger problem for us. So, what should we do then? So, so what should we be thinking about in how we evaluate whether or not we can actually evacuate to our workplace? Well, during 2012, I had a wonderful experience. I got an opportunity, I got invited to be the national private sector representative to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, FEMA, in Washington, D.C. Now when I now, if I thought traffic was bad in Los Angeles, traffic in Los Angeles, that was kindergarten nonsense compared to what I faced in Washington, D.C. Every morning, the freeways are completely jammed going into the city. And so what I did was I actually took a subway. They actually had a train, I would get on the train, and the train would lead to a subway station, I would get off at the subway station, then I and then I actually walked to the building I had to go to. I was there for a number of months, so I would do this, but I noticed every day how bad the traffic was. It's incredibly awful. But so what I did was I left an entire disaster kit at the workplace. Because I because they actually gave me, it was like a cubicle, really, and I wasn't used to working in cubicles, but they had a cubicle there, and I left the backpack full of supplies. Little things. But one of the things I did was like I had toothbrushes, I had soaps, I had all kinds of things, whatever I would need if I had to stay there for multiple days. In the fall of 2012, we had a disaster called a Doret Show. And if you've never been in a Doret Show, Doretos are very strange, very strange emergencies. So it was Friday night. I was sitting and just relaxing in my room. I was actually living with a family. There was a family there and they and they had an extra room, like their son was off to college or something, and so they had his room available and they were renting it to me. So it was no problem. So I was staying there. And it was just a Friday night. I can't remember what I was doing. I was relaxing. And outside there was just a short breeze, just a few miles per hour, you know, four or five miles per hour. You don't even notice it. And all of a sudden, with no warning, I mean no warning, nothing at all, all of a sudden, it started blowing gusts of 120 miles an hour, just whoosh, up against the windows, whoosh up against the doors. It was unbelievable the amount, and the wind was whipping back and forth, and you could see the trees, and then bam, power goes out. Power goes out. And one of the things I realized at that point that I was pretty pretty clearly I was gonna have to evacuate because I was gonna have to, A, I was still working, and then B, I have to have the normal amenities of life. And being it was a Friday night, I wasn't gonna go into the workplace. So what I did was, even though it was dark out, I thought, well, it doesn't matter, power's out, I'm gonna go to bed anyway. I went to sleep, I woke up the next morning, it was a Saturday. I woke up the next morning and I grabbed one of the other backpack along with some food and things, just little items, and I took it to FEMA's headquarters where I was working at. And I literally lived at work for almost a week. I slept on a couch. I had a blanket, I had a little pillow, I had everything I needed, I had my food, I had all the things I had to have. But what was interesting was I had evacuated into the city realizing that other people were evacuating outside. They were trying to leave the city. I actually went the other way. I went towards work and away from everyone else. And you know what ended up happening? I didn't deal with any traffic, I didn't deal with the massive number. Of commuters that I normally dealt with when I was on the subway. So when I got on the subway and I got to DC and I got to headquarters, I stayed there. And you know what? I didn't have to deal with any of the issues that we normally associate with having to evacuate. I didn't have to deal with Karmagedon. So when we are evaluating our options, when we are evaluating wildfires, when we're evaluating hurricanes, we're evaluating blizzards wherever we have to go, what we always need to do is we always need to have not only backup locations, that's not enough. We need to look at the flow of traffic. Where are people going to evacuate to? Because hey, let's be honest. Most people are not going to plan. It's the reality of things. People are not going to plan. So we are going to prepare better than they will. And the way we're going to prepare better than they will is we are going to establish additional directions that we can go because not having an evacuation location to go to is one thing, but having to go with everyone else in that same direction is equally problematic. So we have to make sure that we are evaluating all of our options when we have to evacuate because wildfires, one of the things we found, the 2025 Eden Fire and Palisades fire, was that the wind was whipping every day. So the fire was moving in many directions. It was incredibly unpredictable. There were people who got caught up in it, and this has happened again and again. It happened during the campfire in 2018. It's happened happened in the August complex fire where people were trying to evacuate out of Northern California through Marin and other places, and they hadn't evaluated it, and there were everyone else was evacuating at exactly the same time. So when I'm designing this wildfire shelter, I am giving us, I am buying us time. Because when we are in a place where we say, you know what, it's really nice you say that, Patrick, but the reality is I have to go with traffic. It might be safer to be able to have an alternate option to be able to shelter at home. I'm trying to buy you time so you don't have to sit and roast in your car. So that you are not put in a place where you, your family, your pets, your possessions are not put in a position where they are under threat. We can buy ourselves some additional time and the shelter, having a shelter, even one made out of school supplies, is a one option for us to avoid the traffic jam everywhere. Because when we deal with evacuation traffic, it not only holds us up, it not only creates a Karmageddon, but it creates a situation where the real disaster begins, not from the wildfire itself, but from the way in which we evacuate. That's why it's so important that we think about other options and other opportunities. The more options we have, the more we can avoid any situation that might come up. This is disaster, Patrick, and remember prepare for a disaster and you'll never experience one.