Let us suppose you neighbor an area which suffers a major disaster from which millions begin to flee in your direction, would that prompt you in turn to flee from the wave of refugees?

I guess that would depend if they were wanting to stop in your area or keep going and if they posed a threat. I think it would be case-by-case basis.

There's a reason why they say the home team has the advantage. Being a refugee has got to be worse than dealing with refugees.

As soon as I run out of ammunition...Seriously, I would protect what I have as best I could, like LED said, better to be a defender, than a refugee.

That's what a hurricane evacuation looks like in Houston and elsewhere.

Houston is actually well inland from the coast, far from any storm surge (flooding is a major problem, but it's not storm-surge related). When the coastal residents evacuate it's a large number of people trying to go through Houston.

The horde doesn't want to stop because they can see the crowd around them and know there will no vacancies. The locals should probably just stay off of the roads passing through and the evacuees will be like a swarm of locust that suck gas stations dry, but no worse.

New Orleans / Katrina is a good case study. Almost everyone evacuated along two roads. I've never seen an after-report on this: where did these self-evacuees go, were they given any directions, any evacuation destinations by the authorities?

"Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home"

I would not be inclined to abandon my home.

Best to hunker down and stay off the roads.

And volunteer to help organizational efforts to assist our fellow citizens.

Ditto here. I recently participated in a table top exercise that simulated a spontaneous evacuation from Vancouver BC south to Seattle and Portland. We had a land border to contend with (throughput - Customs will process only so many travellers per hour), 4-6 hours between the border and Seattle, a winter storm that hampered travel, and a reduced likelihood that every one from 1MM+ might self-evacuate. We ended up feeding and sheltering just over 30,000, with many more covered by cities all along I-5 as far south as Portland. All in all it was an interesting excercise, and the major takeaway for me was we were in need of more volunteers to cover all the shelters we eventually opened.

Dagny, if I can recommend - if you want to help organizations during such an event, volunteer with them now: taking in spontaeous volunteers during a disaster can happen, but most relief organizations will thank you for signing up ahead of time. The Red Cross has something called the Reserve Corps, for volunteers who don't want to volunteer for routine fires and flooding, but may turn out for larger events. You do one day of training, and a criminal background check, and are issued a RC ID. Check with your local chapter to see if they currently offer Reserve Corps in your area.

Thanks for the tip about Reserve Corps - sounds interesting and useful.

If you are living in the country or in a very small town, I guess you have to assume and hope that millions of folks fleeing a dense urban area will look to find another such area and not show up to stay indefinitely on your doorstep.

But, what if?