Honoré: Preparedness is the answer, don't count on levees

As of this writing, Hurricane Gustav has been pounding the Gulf Shores for a few hours already and New Orleans has been 90% evacuated. In a CNN interview this weekend, LtGen. Russel Honoré, a Louisiana native who led the military response during Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, warned that the levee network is not likely to hold against Gustav's onslaught. He had some very interesting things to say on preparedness in addition to the status of the levees.

Some highlights from his interview:

"The government decided that we're going to fix the levees that were broken. They have been repaired in the finest fashion. But don't think that we're going to have 100 percent protection [from the levees]. There's a limit to what you can do to protect yourself from flooding.

"People talk about the Dutch. But the Dutch don't get hurricanes. When you're dealing with a storm surge of 30 feet, you're talking about a whole different ballgame. We have over 300 miles of levees.

"I would not count on levees during a hurricane to save your life. Levees will give you early warning. If you're living behind a levee, you need to be prepared to evacuate at any time. That's Russel Honore's rule No. 1. If you live along the Mississippi River or on the Gulf Coast, rule No. 2 is: It's going to flood." ...

"We need to build a culture of preparedness. We need to assure that every kid who goes to school in America knows how to swim. The number of EMS teams and ambulances is not tracking with the growth in population. We need to teach more of our people first aid.

"The federal government ought to be there to back the states up, we need to build a culture of preparedness in each. Why are we sending people there to issue them ice and water? We should be empowering people to act locally. The key to hurricane preparation is family preparation. If families are prepared, we lose fewer lives.

"We need to create a national preparedness plan, with a local civil defense corps. We need dual trained teachers who can be disaster responders. We need to equip each high schools with satellite communications.

"We need drugstores with generators in each geographical area ... If you lose power, people can still get medicine. Gas stations along interstate highways need to have generators. We need cellphone towers that could be lowered before the storm and then raised after the storm.

For every dollar you spend in preparedness before the disaster you save $9 after the disaster."

Blame game, no. Preparedness, yes.

The much-publicized blame game for Hurricane Katrina is one of the biggest exercises in futility and wasted energy I have ever seen in my life. You may point the finger at any figure or figures you like, but the bottom line is that much of the pain and suffering was caused by a plain and simple lack of preparedness from a lot of different quarters - and could have been alleviated more quickly or avoided entirely if people were better prepared.

Though these days people have been conditioned to turn to the government to take care of more and more of their basic needs and necessities (and we are seeing the ultimate consequences of this mentality rearing their ugly head in New Orleans), let's face it, local, state and national governments can only do so much for people caught in a disaster - even under the best of circumstances when aid can reach those who need it, law and order are practiced and enforced, and optimal efficiency, coordination, and organization are in place. It is incumbent on each of us as individuals to assume personal responsibility for our own safety and well-being, take the initiative, and prepare so that we can take care of ourselves and one another and be okay when disaster strikes.

This guide has a lot of practical tips and suggestions that everybody out there can adopt, regardless of their race, ethnicity, income bracket or socioeconomic background. Preparedness, or the lack thereof, isn't a black thing. It isn't a white thing. It's a HUMAN thing. And it's time we all recognized this and acted accordingly.

Put together a plan. Memorize it. And be ready and able to implement it when the time comes. I say when, not if, because even though there probably won't be another natural weather-related disaster on the same scale as Katrina in our lifetime, there WILL be other hurricanes, as well as tornadoes, floods and fires, a major quake in southern California at some point in the future, and terrorist attacks.

None of which will give a damn what color their victims are, by the way. The levees and the flooding didn't care what color(s) the people of New Orleans were. To assert that NOLA wasn't saved because it's a black town, is simply ridiculous. No one in their rational mind can argue, given New Orleans' rich, complex history and heritage, its economic value as a huge tourism draw and the Gulf region's largest and most critical shipping port, its strategic value as the location for most major American petroleum and chemical refineries, etc. etc. that the federal government and all the people outside of NOLA who were watching this tragedy unfold were thinking "Oh, my stars. These great black unwashed and their silly, silly antics. Pish-tosh! A glass of Veuve, my good man, to wet my privileged white whistle as I fiddle while Rome burns!!" To say that the NOLA disaster was a black thing is just plain race-baiting, and vastly oversimplifies the situation and diverts the focus from what the real problem is. How about taking a look at the corrupt officials who figuratively stood dithering in the highway for days, never implemented their own damn evac plan and basically told the victims "Screw you, yer on yer own" before and after they issued the initial evac order and the levees broke. The disaster, although huge proportions of blacks engaged in all areas of human activity were involved because it's a mostly black town demographically speaking, was NOT a RACISM thing. It was an INEPTITUDE, UNPREPAREDNESS, and STUPIDITY (stupidity on the part of politicians at all levels, that is) thing.