A year later, local and Federal emergency workers are still engaged in relief efforts following the devastation left by Hurricane Katrina. One emergency relief worker shared the following observations with us and offered the following advice:
Observation: Generally speaking, due to the unpredictability of mother nature's natural disasters, it is unrealistic to expect your emergency plan to work as perfectly as you anticipate it will.
Advice: Plan to be flexible in executing your emergency plan.
Observation: Do not count on being able to run down to the corner store, hall, or medical facility and expect to receive emergency services. Goods and services at these locations will be instantly overwhelmed by all of those citizens who failed to prepare their home and family to survive the effects of a local natural disaster.
Advice: Prepare a family/home based emergency plan.
Observation: The unprepared will seek shelter anywhere, including hospitals that really need to service the severely injured. If you run to a hospital for shelter but are not injured, expect to be turned away.
Observation: The unprepared, in their desperation, may also brandish weapons in order to secure shelter, services or goods. This will likely result in an evacuation of the area and you’ll end up with less than you started with.
Observation: During the height of Hurricane Katrina’s onslaught, more than one medical facility in New Orleans was ransacked and medical supplies stolen while medical personnel were sequestered in the facility’s “safe zone.”
Advice: Secure emergency and medical supplies in safe zones and assign security guards to keep them secure from theft.
Observation: Following a relatively small, or minor, natural disaster, rescue workers and emergency personnel will be available to give local aid within 72 hours at the earliest. It will take rescue workers and emergency personnel weeks to provide local aid following a huge natural disaster such as Hurricane Katrina.
Advice: “Don't be the CNN shot of beached humans on a rooftop begging for medication, food, & water... be the CNN shot of a family on a roof top with cases of MRE's and water and a sign saying, "we're fine thanks... can last another 20 days".
Conclusion: “You really have no idea what it is like to be in an area with wide spread destruction where there are no services for scores of miles... and there are no services for several days, weeks, or months in some cases. You have to be totally self-sufficient to survive there… with no electricity, no food, no water, no gas, and maybe no home... for days/weeks/months... think about that. And forget about driving somewhere... there may be no where to drive to.”
Name withheld to preserve Privacy
