If disaster strikes and Indian point releases radioactive plumes into the air, Dutchess County government wants its residents to sit tight.

Dutchess-once tapped as a reception point for refugees from New York City and Westchester and Putnam counties-sits within the 50-mile radius of the power plant, but outside the 10-mile zone the government would evacuate during a nuclear disaster.

County response to a nuclear emergency would be focused on the "ingestive pathway" plan, which seeks to protect livestock and agricultural products.

Officials would monitor radiation levels and test local products like milk, wine and vegetables, county emergency coordinator DeWitt Segendorph said.

Ken Davidson, the county's chief deputy emergency coordinator, said any further decisions would be made with state and federal emergency authorities. Monitoring teams on the ground and in helicopters would sample air particles to determine the threat posed to people, he said.

The federal government and officials from Entergy, the company that owns Indian Point, say Dutchess is far enough from the plant that it would not be subject to enough fallout to harm people.

Sagendorph said county authorities are prepared in the event of a disaster, even though Dutchess is not part of the immediate four-county plan. County residents would be alerted by public service announcements on radio and television.

There are no plans for evacuation or to stockpile potassium iodide, which combats the thyroid cancer caused by nuclear fallout. Government planners say those measures would be unnecessary.

Allan Morris, president of Anbex, Inc., the company that supplies potassium iodide pills to the government, said the stockpile assembled in New York's disaster planners falls well short of what would be needed to protect the population of 20 million.

"New York has a grand total of 1.2 million (pills). At just 10 tablets per person, to make the math easy, what's that, 120,00 people?" Morris said, "That's not enough to even cover Westchester."

Panicking residents

While independent emergency planning experts are split on whether evacuation would be the best plan, all point to the human panic factor.

A 2002 survey by the Marist Institute of Public Opinion found 60 percent of people living within 50 miles of Indian Point would flee if a disaster happened. That means hundreds of thousands of people could head for the Interstate 84, the Taconic State Parkway and Route 9-arteries that can barely handle routine rush-hour traffic, let alone a mass exodus.

Bruce Blythe, CEO of Atlanta-based Crisis Mangement International, foresees "the absolute worse traffic jams you've ever had in your life."

Blythe, who has consulted with the FBI and the State Department on security matters, said the majority of people will scramble to find their families and then flee, despite warnings or plans to the contrary. That prediction echoes a January report to Gov. George Pataki by James Lee Witt, the former head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

"You're going to jump in your car," he said. "The phones are going to be absolutely jammed. Everybody will want to get out of Dodge."

A psychological mental distancing, or dissociation, keeps emergency planners from preparing for the likely human response to nuclear disaster, Blythe said.

Effective response to nuclear disasters require an alert, informed public that knows exactly what to do, said Linda Young Landesman, and investigator at the Center for Public Health Preparedness at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health.

"People's behaviors will be dependent upon how the evacuation alerts are handled," said Landesman, who also sits on the Weapons of Mass Destruction Advisory Committee for the New York City Department of Health. "If they wait until there has already been massive release of radiation, people are going to panic."

When Russia's Chernobyl power plant ruptured in 1986 and plumes of radioactive fallout spread from the reactor, the Soviet government funneled thousands of potassium iodide pills to people within 30 miles of the plant. Years later, it became evident the drug worked-and the people most affected by the radiation and subsequent cancer were not those living near the plant, but those outside the 30-mile radius who hadn't received potassium iodide pills. Thyroid cancer rates among children outside the radius have reached up to 100 times normal levels in some areas, a Cambridge University study reported in 1999.

Report: Confidence Low

The Witt report says first responders-like firefighters and EMS personnel-may not have confidence in the plan. The report said communications problems persist and plan do not take into account variables that come with such a dense population around the nuclear plant.

U.S. Representative Sure Kelly, R-Kotanah – whose district includes Indian Point – called for a temporary shutdown of the plant in the wake of the Witt report and held a congressional hearing on the evacuation plan in February.

She said FEMA had very few answers to questions about evacuation, nuclear plant resistance to a terrorist strike and public education.

"My concern was about the fact that FEMA simply refuses to acknowledge what the Witt report has made clear, and that is that we live in an age of terrorism," she said.

"I think also they (FEMA) have ignored the fact that the Witt report said that we need to have different plans for high population areas. They have not done anything about that."