Location Il Avari - the capital
Objective - senior civil servant organising the evacuation
OOC: I'm going to do some posts from the POV of civilians caught up in the evacuation. I hope this is ok?
Dr. Malcolm Lask was not having a good day. To be frank, he was having a terrible day. He stood at the back of The Hub's main control suite and watched the screen that took up hundreds of square meters before the busy staff.
He had been rudely woken just an hour ago, in the small hours of the morning. By the time he'd reached The Hub, thirty minutes later, chaos had already set in. He looked at the oversized map of Il Avali and sighed, running a hand through what was left of his thin, white hair.
The evacuation wasn't going according to plan, but that in itself was an achievement. They were within the bounds of an acceptable rate still. And he knew, he had been one of the key members who created the city's disaster plans. He had set the acceptable bounds for evacuation time.
Malcolm had received his doctorate in civil engineering over four decades ago. His long and distinguished career had led to him taking up ministerial advisory positions to several governments. For the last five years he had been the most senior civil servant in Druckenwell's Ministry of Transport. He was personally responsible to the Minister of Transport for delivering the city's Infrastructure Programmes.
He watched the map and traced out the pinch points. The first hour of the evacuation had mostly involved waking up the inhabitants, but now the gridlock was beginning to set in. He was still glad the Protectorate had decided to attack at four in the morning. They only had ten million citizens to move from within the warzone that had been described.
If Il Avali had been in the daytime he would have had twenty million. The population doubled with commuters each day. If they'd attacked at rush hour the infrastructure would simply have collapsed.
The richer sections of the city were evacuating rapidly. Those citizens often had their own air speeders. The problem was the blue collar districts. Tightly packed and with no personal land speeders, let alone air speeders. Great black regions were on the infrastructure in those areas. Apparently someone had programmed a colour to indicate something worse that red.
He noticed something and shouted out to one of his aides: "Get the police to get the civilians off the Memorial Park!"
"But that's an assembly point?"
"Because we're going to be landing a space freighter on it soon!" Malcolm "Clear the park!"
"On it!"
Malcolm strolled up and down the aisles of the Hub. This control centre managed the infrastructure and emergency services for the whole city. The main floor was huge, housing hundreds of staff, and the very latest systems kept tight control of the city. They were being stretched to breaking point.
The briefings with the Military had been … testy. They wanted all civilians out within three hours so they could start preparing the defence. He wanted every available soldier and shuttle helping with the evacuation of civilians. In the end they had settled on some achievable goals. Suburbs evacuated within two hours, the East within four and the West within six. The problem was not the capacity of the transport links. It was getting all of the citizens in the packed city to the transport hubs to evacuate.
It didn't give the military much time to prepare. They already wanted to start breaking his precious roads and making choke points to defend the city. They would have to wait. Military shuttles were making good gains in getting civilians off the ground and out of the combat zone.
At least, he reflected, his services would be in demand after this was finished. There would be a lot of infrastructure projects to complete to get the city back on its feet.
“How are the health services doing?” He asked one of the senior health service officials.
“Struggling, but we'll cope!” Came the reply.
The hospitals were running at capacity, the problem was that the emergency services needed to assist in the evacuation as well as complete their regular duty. Several civilians had already died due to the poor response times of ambulances this morning.
Malom knew that right now medical symbols were being painted across the roofs of key medical facilities. Even though patients were being evacuated, the facilities would remain open throughout the conflict. Their locations had already been sent in a message to the Protectorate forces, hopefully they would have enough time to ensure their forces didn't target them.
Malcolm approached one of his junior managers. The man was young, but exceptionally bright.
“Have we picked the locations for these space freighters on their way?” he asked.
“Nearly done. We're going to land them in the suburbs first, then as they arrive we'll direct them to pinch points,” he replied, showing Malcolm a datapad that had key locations marked near the areas of the city that were most gridlocked.
“Good, good.” Malcolm replied. The space freighters would be useful. The problem was they were one-hit-wonders. They could land, and pick up a few thousand citizens within a twenty minutes or so, but then that was it. They were gone. The civilian transports and trains could go back and forth to the designated refugee sites being set up by the military beyond the a hundred kilometers away. Once they were clear of the city they could worry about further off-world evacuations, but for now he would have to rely on and infrastructure scaled to cope with ten million commuters during rush hour.
If the freighters could relieve the pinch points, he might just be able to meet the target of six hours he'd agreed with the military. At least the suburbs were nearly empty, the plans required most transports to stop in the outskirts at first to allow the citizens from the inner city a clear run later in the day.
Luke Tyrell, one of his senior aides slowly approached him. “Malcolm, we need to talk about something...a little sensitive.”
“Alright,” Malcolm replied, and led Luke to one of the side rooms.
“We need to discuss which staff are going to remain once the twelve hours is up,” Luke said.
“Oh. Very good point. Hmm.”
“I could, perhaps, get one of the junior staff to quietly prepare a list?”
“People with families first?”
“Yes,”
“Fine. Look you're good at this kind of thing. Have a quiet word around. Let's see if anyone is particullay struggling, or determined to see the course yes?”
“Of course,” Luke replied with a firm nod.
“Oh, and make sure the Hub has been listed as a non-military facility that will remain open?”
“Of course,”
