Crowds, Curfews and Staying Out of Trouble

Civil disruption is a movement problem before it is anything else. Almost everyone who gets caught up in one was travelling through it rather than involved in it.

What does a curfew actually do?

It restricts movement in a defined area between set hours, usually with exemptions for medical need, essential work and travel out of the zone.

Curfews are declared locally, published by the county or city, and enforced on the road rather than at the door. The practical effect for an ordinary household is narrow: do not be driving through the zone during the hours, and carry something that shows where you live. The exemptions almost always cover getting home and getting to medical care, and they almost never cover sightseeing.

The failure mode is not defiance. It is a household that did not know the curfew existed because they were watching national coverage instead of the county’s own feed.

Knowing before you drive into it

Local sources tell you where the closures are. National coverage tells you a story. Only one of those changes your route.

• Your county or city emergency management feed. This is where curfew hours and boundaries are actually published.
• The state department of transportation road map. Closures appear here before they appear anywhere else.
• A local radio station on a battery radio. It keeps working when the network is congested, which is exactly when you need it.
• A printed map with your three routes on it, for the same reason it is useful in an evacuation.

Leave early, or do not leave

The households that stay out of trouble either moved before the situation developed or stayed put entirely. The middle option is the one that goes wrong.

Decision	When it works	When it fails	What it needs
Leave early, before any order	Almost always	Rarely, mostly cost and inconvenience	A destination already agreed
Stay put throughout	Most of the time, for most households	If the property itself is in the affected area	Supplies, and a way to hear updates
Leave during	Occasionally	Often, and this is where people get caught	Routes that avoid the zone entirely
Go and look	Never	Always	Nothing worth having

The trade is between cost and certainty. Leaving early costs money and looks foolish if nothing happens. It also removes the entire category of problem. Households that can afford to leave early and do it almost never appear in anybody’s account of what went wrong.

If you are already out and it develops around you

Movement is the whole answer, and the direction is away from density rather than towards home.

1. Stop travelling towards it. Whatever is behind you is safer than what is ahead.
2. Turn perpendicular to the flow of people or traffic rather than against it. Against is slow and conspicuous.
3. Get out of the vehicle only if the vehicle is trapped. It is shelter and it is transport.
4. Head for a business, a hospital or a public building, not an alley or a car park.
5. Call one person and tell them where you are going, then keep the phone off to save it.

A colleague in our county was three streets from a closure that formed in about twenty minutes during a protest that had been peaceful an hour earlier. She turned east, away from the direction everyone was walking, and was clear in six minutes. The people who went straight through spent two hours in stationary traffic. There was no danger in either case. There was a great deal of difference in the evening.

What is not worth doing?

Anything that puts you closer to it, and anything that makes your household the interesting house on the street.

• Do not go and look. Every account of somebody caught up in something starts with this sentence.
• Do not post your location or your supplies. The households with a problem are, without exception, the ones that told people.
• Do not arm a plan you have not thought through. The legal and practical consequences of that decision sit outside anything this site is qualified to advise on, and they do not go away because the power is out.

Choosing where you would go, and the routes to get there, is covered in choosing a place to go before you need one. Federal guidance on evacuation is at Ready.gov, and everything else on leaving is under evacuation and route planning.

Source: https://survivaldan101.com/crowds-curfews-and-staying-out-of-trouble/