Hurricane Awareness Week Proposal

Written by Aubrey Samost

One of the major issues of preparing for a hurricane is impressing upon people the urgency of the situation.  When a storm like Katrina is approaching, many residents have the habit of assuming that they will be all right if they stay in their homes.  They forget the death and destruction associated with a hurricane.  After several years people forget the horror of what happened as a result of the storm.  They see a town or a city without any markings of the hurricane and they assume that this time they will come through unscathed. This was scene before when Hurricane Camille hit New Orleans.  Everybody swore to remember the dangers of a major hurricane and to never let this destruction happen again.  However, people forgot about Camille, and along came Katrina.  It was a formula for trouble.   Based upon this trend, we feel that it is necessary to make people remember the past in order to protect themselves in the future.  We have two proposed projects to carry out this goal.

Katrina Memorial

We want to build a memorial to commemorate the victims of hurricane Katrina and to immortalize the scar the great storm left on the history of New Orleans. Here, the old cliché, “He who does not know history is doomed to repeat it,” seems oddly apropos.  To remember the Holocaust, people built memorials around the world.  The residents of New Orleans cannot afford to forget Hurricane Katrina, so we feel that they need a memorial to keep the memory of the tragedy fresh in their mind.  We cannot repeat this historical tragedy again.

Hurricane Awareness Week

Education is paramount in our quest to protect the city in the future.  Hurricane Awareness Week would be planned for early April at the beginning of the hurricane season.  It would include a massive advertising campaign involving public announcements on the television and the radio as well as pamphlets detailing evacuation routes and general hurricane safety tips such as tying down loose objects and boarding up windows.  It would also involve officials, like police and firefighters, going into the schools to talk to the children.  Methods like this have been effective in dealing with fire safety and drug awareness using programs like DARE.  The officials would go into schools and talk to children explaining evacuation plans and what to do in case a hurricane is coming.  If we can make children understand the seriousness of a hurricane, they will be more likely to remember these lessons as adults.  This emphasis on safety and education will help to make sure that people make a more informed decision when the order comes to evacuate New Orleans.  We hope to have most of the people out of the city, reducing the death toll of the hurricane.

As of right now, the city of New Orleans has the safety information available on the web and in some pamphlets, according to city residents.  The website in particular is a very useful tool, outlining four steps to preparing for a hurricane, including: finding information on the likelihood of certain disasters happening to you, creating an emergency plan, securing your house, and educating the entire family about your plan (City of New Orleans).  The same website also includes a suggested list of supplies to include in a disaster kit and a first aid kit.  The information offered on this website is impressive, but not all homes have computers or people who can use them.  Also, the information is hard to find, requiring the person to go through several links from the homepage.  Our plan would use similar suggestions but make them more readily available to the public.