COUNCILMAN’S CORNER
Greetings! At the time of this writing I’m sitting in a Hurricane Katrina AND Hurricane Rita shelter in south central Louisiana where I’m a medical volunteer with a great group out of Elkhart, IN known as Hope Crisis Relief Network. There are about 500 (up from 300 2 days ago) residents of this shelter—300 or so from New Orleans and 200 from Texas. These evacuees, who range from 2 days to over 80 years of age, are sleeping on cots in an old but fairly clean local factory about the size of 2 football fields. Everyone involved—nurses and doctors and EMT’s and physician’s assistants and social workers and logistics people and police officers—is working hard to keep all of the folks here healthy and well fed until they can be relocated home or elsewhere. The volunteers in this shelter are literally from all over the country. Everyone seems to work well together. Our common goal is to provide the best care we can for the 500 folks who currently call this old factory “home.”
The medical staff on duty here has also had some time to reflect on how these recent hurricanes and other emergencies have been handled. The response to Hurricane Rita has been much more proactive than the response to Hurricane Katrina. On the other hand, we’ve been able to see first hand quite a bit of disorganization during the entire month of September. Two hundred evacuees were supposed to arrive here from Texas 2 days ago. They didn’t arrive, the rumor was that the plans had been cancelled, and then the 200 Texans did arrive basically unannounced. Watching the overviews of the Texas freeways on TV was interesting. Several mile long lines of cars sat in the northbound freeway lanes running out of gas. In the meantime, southbound lanes, which could have been used for one-way traffic heading north, were almost completely unused. Our local Homeland Security Director, Bernie Beier, is well aware that in a situation like this it makes sense to route all traffic away from the disaster. On the other hand, my suspicion is that we need to do much more to protect the citizens of this community and this country from disasters—natural or otherwise. After all, public safety is basically the most important job of local, state, and federal government!
When I return I plan to discuss these issues further with Bernie Beier and other public safety officials. We need to take another hard look at disaster prevention (which is best) and response in our area. I personally favor periodic unannounced disaster drills simulating a variety of events such as tornadoes, airplane crashes, and terrorist attacks. We need to make sure that our community is well prepared for whatever comes our way!
Give me a call with any thoughts or suggestions!
Tom Hayhurst
City Councilman
4th District
432-8418
tom.hayhurst@verizon.net
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