With the ground still drying out from the remnants of Tropical Storm Fay, another major hurricane looms on the horizon.And like Hurricane Katrina, which devastated the Gulf Coast exactly three years ago, Hurricane Gustav could cause major damage to the area.
This time, though, we hope the government is better prepared.
Katrina killed almost 2,000 people, but many of those lives could have been saved if local, state and, especially, the federal government had been better prepared both before and after the storm flattened and flooded New Orleans and other cities along the Gulf of Mexico.
Negligence on the part of the very people we trust most to protect us resulted in the deaths of countless Americans. And we are still untangling the financial mess left behind from how Washington disbursed emergency relief funds.
Unlike some of our neighboring states, Alabama was well prepared to weather the storm, and our government had taken every precaution, as it had in the past with other hurricanes like Ivan, to evacuate people out of affected areas.
Washington — and Louisiana — would have been well served to borrow a page from Alabama’s playbook in dealing with emergency situations, but sadly, that did not happen.
Instead, American citizens were left in inadequately stocked shelters or in their flooded homes, where an unconscionable number of them died.
Now we are facing a similar scenario, and we hope federal officials have learned from their previous mistakes and are ready for Gustav — or any other serious national emergency.
If nothing else, the past eight years should have taught us the importance of being prepared for worst-case emergencies, from the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, to the dispersal of anthrax through the mail, to hurricanes battering our coastline.
After all that we have been through, the government should have the experience to deal with whatever comes at us next.
Anything else would be plain incompetence, and we have had about all of that we can take.
