I'm not really sure. In theory, it should be the governor of the state working with NOAA and FEMA, but in practice it seems like cities or counties have been mo

I'm not really sure. In theory, it should be the governor of the state working with NOAA and FEMA, but in practice it seems like cities or counties have been mostly left to try and interpret NOAA's information on their own. FEMA is supposed to be the national authority, but has a ... marginal track record a its often headed by political appointees with minimal experience who can coast along just fine for years because nothing major happens -- five near-miss hurricanes mean getting some extra food and water down while the linemen put the power lines back, and it's all easy. Then Katrina or Harvey happens and you find out really quick who has any idea which way is up. The complete impracticality of a large scale evacuation probably precludes any real effort finding its footing. CalFire out in CA is probably one of the better organizations you could look to worldwide in terms of trying to get people out of harms way, it still seems to be mostly on individual communities to figure out how they're going to evacuate once the word comes down. There were some awful stories out of the Camp Fire of people caught by the fire as they were stuck on the limited roads out. And most of those communities are small. I don't think it's possible to evacaute, say, the Bay Area in under a month if you had to do it. Too many people all on the same roads, and while the airports might be able to conceivably move a few hundred thousand passengers a day, you'd still have the problem of getting people TO the airports and coordinating fuel and crew and all that. There probably is a way to get some kind of realistic planning capability in FEMA and the NRCC, but given the near-total failure of the US Congress in the last two decades the likelihood of a major reorganization that put enough real experts in long term positions with goals that weren't tied to immediate events seems like it's about zero. This turned into a bit of rambling digression, but at least from an observer in a vaguely related field of critical infrastructure, it really feels like there has been a serious lack of meaningful leadership outside of the old DOD/NORAD planning for nuclear wars (for which rapid evacuations of populations were basically out of the question from the beginning).