No one seems to know exactly when evacuation became the terror mantra for Capitol Hill. 

When the Germans were bombing London, the civil authority told citizens to go to subway tunnels or the basements of strong buildings.

When the entire country, during the ’50s, was preparing for nuclear attack, the civil authority selected and prepared “air-raid shelters,” which were inevitably the basements of strong buildings. Many people prepared their own — in back yards, under garages or in root cellars.

But when a similar attack is apprehended here, the civil authority tells top government servants to rush out of doors. (The citizens, notably, are told nothing.) Those managing the reaction to attack, Capitol Police Chief Terrance Gainer and the sergeants at arms, plus the architect of the Capitol, Alan Hantman, have never explained why exposing Hill staffers and members to whatever may fall from the sky is the answer.

The complex is still operating under an “interim” evacuation plan written in September 2001 by Rep. Robert Ney (R-Ohio) and Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) of the Committee on House Administration. The heart of the plan is simplicity itself:” “Everyone must evacuate immediately.”

Not only does evacuation make the citizens of the Capitoline campus completely vulnerable to blast, fragments, toxic chemicals or other dangers, it also creates a massing of people which is a perfect invitation to evil-doers.

Yet all the planning for reaction to attack on the Capitol, and on the White House, for that matter, takes it on faith that the safe place to be is on the street, in the park or walking, as directed in the last ludicrous evacuation panic (the Cessna incursion), toward Union Station.

There is almost no mention of the use of the voluminous and deep basements of the Capitol, much less the many tunnels connecting the House and Senate office buildings. Even the evacuation tunnel that was built at vast expense across Constitution Avenue simply dumps its users in the open air near Louisiana Avenue N.E.

One exception: Library of Congress workers were told to go to the basement and the tunnels beneath their building.

The only logic to the evacuation plan for a terror attack is that the next attack will be the same as that which struck New York and the Pentagon, with fuel-laden jets manned by madmen on suicide runs. But one sure bet is that the next attack will be different.

Our own Central Park

The old Washington Convention Center never looked so good.

That unlovely building (remember the concrete balls and the nonfunctioning fountain?) has been reduced to its elements and lies in piles of tan concrete gravel; the 10,000 tons of steel, all salvaged, have presumably been sent off to China to reappear here as cheap imported nails, etc.

But the space ... the space! Now, downtown has this enormous air-and-light-filled field, all nine city blocks of it, between 9th and 11th, between H Street and New York Avenue, and it is glorious — it is Washington’s Central Park.

Unfortunately, City Council, at war as usual with Mayor Anthony Williams (D), has a great plan for this phenomenal plain: a parking lot.

Eventually, of course, developer Hines Interests LP of Houston would like to build 772 units of condo and other housing, some of it for moderate-income people, a quarter of a million square feet of retail space, slightly more of offices, and 50,000 square feet of library. The bicker with the mayor is whether or not to put a hotel linked to the new convention center there as well. Williams thinks not.

The time frame is as remarkable as the wasted opportunity. Whatever development is placed there, it will not break ground until 2009. It will not be finished until 2011. In the meantime ... parking.

Ostensibly, the parking is needed to serve the new convention center. What downtown will get are acres of black asphalt baking in the D.C. summer sun, creating a heat sink the like of which the city has not seen before.

And, as usual, the main beneficiaries will be the 300,000 commuters who thunder in and out of the city daily, the same people who voted so decisively with their feet during all the decades since President Eisenhower ordered the public schools integrated in 1954. Also on the downside: thousands of new parking spaces are a strong disincentive for public transportation; with the giant parking lot and the off-and-on nature of convention-center business, the site is a natural magnet for cars, an environmental disaster area with problems yet unseen. Drainage alone will send water contaminated with oil and other fluids, along with a handsome amount of trash, into the city’s antiquated storm-sewer system.

Here on the Hill, we have the country’s foremost landscape architects, James van Sweden and Wolfgang Oehme. They’ve brought their vision of waving ornamental grasses to sites as different as Oprah Winfrey’s estate and the 7th Street S.E. Metro Plaza (not yet created). Perhaps, with the right incentive, the two could draw a plan for the vast new downtown plain, to turn it into tundra of grasses and other vegetation. This need not exclude parking, just temper it.

The council’s improbable Catania

What would the Hill do without City Council’s iconoclastic ex-Republican David Catania (I-At large)?
He shouldn’t even be looming large in Democratic-dominated, name-recognition, macho-facho D.C. politics: He’s white, he’s gay, he’s a former Republican and he’s elected only because of a Congress-mandated rule for its pet city that “two at large members [of the City Council] must come from the non-majority party.”

But now he’s the most persuasive man on the council, mainly because of his love of facts, his pugnacious lawyer’s manner and his rock-hard common sense.

Case in point is his suggestion that a modest, two-building medical center could take the place of D.C. General Hospital in Hill East and solve the muddle caused by the city’s approximately 80,000 uninsured citizens. One thing it would not be, he says, is a trauma hospital. Serious accidents as well as the all-too-frequent knife, blunt-instrument and gun cases would still go to larger hospitals.

Catania’s proposal contrasts favorably with the others put forward in the D.C. healthcare debate. It effectively checkmates a dubious plan for Howard University and D.C. to “team up” to create a $410 million “world class” hospital at the old D.C. General site off 19th Street S.E.

It would also answer two health needs. First, it would take care of those city dwellers who go to the emergency room for every health problem from a hangnail to a hernia. Second, if it were staffed with specialists (in pediatrics, for example), it might attract the wealthy young couples filtering back to the city to live, especially to neighborhoods like the Hill.

And it would cost 10 times less, an estimated $42 million, with an estimated $12 million annual subsidy. Contrast the Howard-D.C. plan, $410 million to build and $38 million in annual subsidies.

METRO

• Barry Watch: While he was mayor, Ward 8 Democratic Councilman Marion Barry frequently referred to his “financial wizardry,” and close observers note that he still has the touch. He saved a surprise for his May 12 “retire the debt” party at Georgia Brown’s, according to the Washington City Paper’s James Jones: Instead of the $50 he reported to the D.C. Office of Campaign Finance, he was really $25,000 in the red, for “salaries and rent.” But campaign workers say they are yet to be paid. ...

• Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner (6B) Ken Jarboe teed off on a D.C. Transportation official this month over an apparently covert plan to build another commuter bridge extending Massachusetts Avenue S.E. across the Anacostia. This reporter named the wrong victim, due to misinformation on the agenda handout. The recipient of the blast was Allen Miller of the District Department of Transportation. ...

• Angry Eastern Market merchants have hired a lawyer and settled on their own “nuclear strategy” to end the two-year hassle over leases at the market. “If [Market Manager] Stuart Smith does not propose a lease that is acceptable,” said one, “we will take him to court and that will tie the whole thing up for years and years.” Which is the equivalent of a long-term lease. ...

• Northeast’s Advisory Neighborhood Commission (6A) is going after liquor stores on the emerging H Street N.E. shopping corridor. Longtime Commissioner Daniel Pernell notes that the street has far more liquor outlets than other shopping streets, and far fewer so-called “voluntary agreements” to limit sales of single beers. The ANC can put liquor licenses in jeopardy at renewal time...

• The Hill’s veteran City Councilwoman Sharon Ambrose (D-Ward 6) had to step in to end a squabble between the “dog people” and the “children people” at tiny Kingman Park at 13th and D streets N.E. Claims of dogs running wild and threatening children on one side, stories of anti-pet people opening park gates to let dogs run onto the street on the other. Ambrose decreed that all dogs must be on leash. “Go to Congressional Cemetery,” she advised the canine crowd.