Katrina - Lesson Learned!

[dws1117]

+1 Stevie

Get the *bleep* out! Don't wait until it is over your house. By then it is too late. Pack what you need, but don't overload. resign yourself to the fact that everything you own, minus what you can reasonably take, is gone. Most things can be replaced in time. That is after all, why we pay for insurance.

My family and I will be headed for a Nacogdoches land.

That's my lesson from Katrina. GET OUT!!! I've lived here all my life. We have ridden out several storms, but I would even contamplate a tangle with a cat 4-5 storm. Allison was bad, and that was just a TS that decided to put on the brakes over our area.

[SRVA]

Stevie, Great post. Two additional thoughts:

1. Practice your plan. Some might think it paranoid to practice it once a year but you need to practice it to make sure it will work.

2. Get out earlier instead of later. No good to have a plan and then get caught up in grid-lock to weather out the storm in your vehicle. Have alternate routes.

[stevie_d_64]

You guys got the right mindset...

Better to weather a "Katrina" 250 miles inland where it might be a Cat 2-3, then on the coast, obviously...

I see us being ready to implement this "plan" and its alternates by Thanksgiving '05...Thats when I see us having the "pre-positioned" stuff stowed at "Site-B"...

Next time any of you want to talk about it face to face, I can give you some very detailed ideas I have on our plan so you guys can work those things into a custom deal that works for your needs...

I figure by next summer, we'll all be in good shape...

[tex45acp]

I work in the coastal town of Port Lavaca, TX. A couple of years ago Hurricane Claudette snuck into Port O'Connor earlier that predicted and headed north. It came into PL and did some significant damage to the houses and buildings in that town and caused some significant flooding, of course, nothing like Katrina has caused. I saw families that were pulling trailers full of their stuff, some dangerously overloaded and some leaving a trail of where they had gone like breadcrumbs in a forrest. One of my employees made the comment to me about loading up all the office equipment so it would not be destroyed or looted for that matter. I have 3 servers, 30 training computers and 9 administrative computers.
I told them that the most important thing was for them to take care of themselves. I sent everyone home and before I left I loaded up the three server computers that hold all the financials and our database, boarded up the glass windows and doors and headed north. I live about 90 miles north of Port Lavaca. The rest of the computers and office equipment was left to weather the storm.
My point is....take only what you need to survive and get the H_ _L out of harms way by any means legally possible.

[anygunanywhere]

Some good reading from a Canadian. He specifically mentions the Lone Star State.

Subject: Re: David Warrens column Ottawa Citizen Sunday Sept 11 05


George Bush, the man

David Warren
The Ottawa Citizen


Sunday, September 11, 2005


There's plenty wrong with America, since you asked. I'm tempted to say that the only difference from Canada is that they have a few things right. That would be unfair, of course -- I am often pleased to discover things we still get right.

But one of them would not be disaster preparation. If something happened up here, on the scale of Katrina, we wouldn't even have the resources to arrive late. We would be waiting for the Americans to come save us, the same way the government in Louisiana just waved and pointed at Washington, D.C. The theory being that, when you're in real trouble, that's where the adults live.

And that isn't an exaggeration. Almost everything that has worked in the recovery operation along the U.S. Gulf Coast has been military and National Guard. Within a few days, under several commands, finally consolidated under the remarkable Lt.-Gen. Russel Honore, it was once again the U.S. military efficiently cobbling together a recovery operation on a scale beyond the capacity of any other earthly institution.

We hardly have a military up here. We have elected one feckless government after another that has cut corners until there is nothing substantial left. We don't have the ability even to transport and equip our few soldiers. Should disaster strike at home, on a big scale, we become a Third World country. At which point, our national smugness is of no avail.

From Democrats and the American Left -- the U.S. equivalent to the people who run Canada -- we are still hearing that the disaster in New Orleans showed that a heartless, white Republican America had abandoned its underclass.

This is garbage. The great majority of those not evacuated lived in assisted housing and receive food stamps, prescription medicine and government support through many other programs. Many have, all their lives, expected someone to lift them to safety, without input from themselves. And the demagogic mayor they elected left, quite literally, hundreds of transit and school buses that could have driven them out of town parked in rows, to be lost in the flood.

Yes, that was insensitive. But it is also the truth; and sooner or later we must acknowledge that welfare dependency creates exactly the sort of haplessness and social degeneration we saw on display, as the floodwaters rose. Many suffered terribly, and many died, and one's heart goes out. But already the survivors are being put up in new accommodations, and their various entitlements have been directed to new locations.

The scale of private charity has also been unprecedented. There are yet no statistics, but I'll wager the most generous state in the union will prove to have been arch-Republican Texas and that, nationally, contributions in cash and kind are coming disproportionately from people who vote Republican. For the world divides into "the mouths" and "the wallets."

The Bush-bashing, both down there and up here, has so far lost touch with reality, as to raise questions about the bashers' state of mind.

Consult any authoritative source on how government works in the United States and you will learn that the U.S. federal government's legal, constitutional, and institutional responsibility for first response to Katrina, as to any natural disaster, was zero.

Notwithstanding, President Bush took the prescient step of declaring a disaster, in order to begin deploying FEMA and other federal assets, two full days in advance of the stormfall. In the little time since, he has managed to co-ordinate an immense recovery operation -- the largest in human history -- without invoking martial powers. He has been sufficiently presidential to respond, not even once, to the extraordinarily mendacious and childish blame-throwing.

One thinks of Kipling's poem If, which I learned to recite as a lad, and mention now in the full knowledge that it drives postmodern leftoids and gliberals to apoplexy -- as anything that is good, beautiful, or true:

If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

But make allowance for their doubting too;

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,

Or being hated, don't give way to hating,

And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise .

Unlike his critics, Bush is a man, in the full sense presented by these verses. A fallible man, like all the rest, but a man.