THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 21, 1942 EVACUATION PROBLEMS

New Zealand Herald, Volume 79, Issue 24178, 21 January 1942, Page 6

THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 21, 1942 EVACUATION PROBLEMS

Evacuation of civilians in a M r ar emergency raises many questions to which it will be wise to find the answers in advance of the need. The city controller, Mr. C. J. Lovegrove, has ascertained that accommodation for a very large number of evacuees has been or is being organised in South Auckland, an assurance that is an essential preliminary. His success brings a touch of realism to the scheme and also suggests a number of important questions that have yet to be answered, some of them being raised by Mr. Lovegrove himself. One of the first decisions should be as to the degree of emergency required to bring any scheme into effect. In Britain, it will be remembered, a bombing emergency was anticipated, evacuation took place, but the Luftwaffe did not begin to operate seriously until 11 months later. Meanwhile the scheme fell into popular disrepute and a large proportion of the evacuees drifted back to the cities. The authorities here should seek to avoid such a fiasco, and its many human consequences. Next it will have to be decided who are to be evacuated and in what order, how many they are in all and by classes, how they are to be allocated to reception areas, and how conveyed there. Here is a first-class administrative task. It calls for decision, registration, classification, and transport organisation. As Mr. Lovegrove has suggested, the last item poses special problems when large bodies of troops may be on the move and using most of the available transport media, whose functioning may have been impaired by enemy action. If evacuation is to be taken seriously—s'harp experience suggests that it should be—answers must be supplied to these questions, and speedily. The enemy will not wait until we are ready. Delay may also discount the value of some solutions. Take the movement of evacuees, for instance. Fleets of private motorcars might provide a principal means of transport but their availability is daily declining for lack of petrol to keep them in going order. This is a point that the authorities should note. Is petrol so short that it is necessary to sacrifice this means of mass mobility? A major question is raised when it is asked whether evacuation is to be compulsory or voluntary for the selected classes. If compulsory, the authorities could make an exact measure of their task and be able to carry it out completely. They would also assume very heavy and numerous responsibilities. It is noteworthy that in Britain evacuation has continued to be voluntary, in spite of the defects and incompleteness of such a scheme, and the difficulty of estimating exactly the calls that will be made on it in hard practice. Evacuation also raises many acute domestic and psychological problems—fathers separated from families, mothers anc'. children caused to cope suddenly with a strange environment, children separated from both parents and chronically homesick, the impact of rural ways of living and thinking on the newcomers, and vice versa. These and many more must remain individual problems and a whole literature has been devoted to them in Britain. They are mentioned as showing how highly complex the seemingly simple enterprise of evacuation proves ,to be when worked out. British experience suggests, howthat the main burden of the scheme falls, not on the evacuees, but on their hosts. The case of reception areas therefore deserves sympathetic and systematic consideration. Hosts should be paid adequate billeting allowances and can scarcely be expected to collect them from parents, unknown to them and living far away in Auckland. The Government should make itself responsible for collecting and paying allowances. Next comes the provision of food and other stores iD districts suddenly called on to cater for a large influx of population—another administrative problem. More difficult is to secure the contentment of the evacuees in the new environment and that is largely a matter of occupation. Britain had much bitter experience of the consequences of allowing children to run wild, with schools closed in the cities and not open in the country. Thus a large problem of organisation is posed for the education boards and they as much as the other authorities will require some estimate of the numbers to be provided for in particular districts and also the districts from which they will bo drawn. Altogether it would seem that the various authorities will have to solve problems on data that cannot be accurately stated but which will nevertheless have to be attacked if a workable scheme is to be evolved. It seems urgently desirable that it should be, and the sooner the better.