Lt. Gen. Honore: Nation needs 'Culture of Preparedness'

Honore, as a commentator for CNN:

I would not count on levees during a hurricane to save your life. Levees will give you early warning. If you're living behind a levee, you need to be prepared to evacuate at any time. That's Russel Honore's rule No. 1. If you live along the Mississippi River or on the Gulf Coast, rule No. 2 is: It's going to flood.

Honore went on to say that everyone in our nation needs to be trained in disaster preparedness so that we can survive at a local level while waiting for national help to arrive.

This is a terrific overview of what we as a nation should - and could easily be doing to prepare ourselves for environmental disasters.

Good stuff. Too bad Honore isn't in charge of Fema, eh?

Honore:

We need to build a culture of preparedness. We need to assure that every kid who goes to school in America knows how to swim. The number of EMS teams and ambulances is not tracking with the growth in population. We need to teach more of our people first aid.

The federal government ought to be there to back the states up, we need to build a culture of preparedness in each. Why are we sending people there to issue them ice and water? We should be empowering people to act locally. The key to hurricane preparation is family preparation. If families are prepared, we lose fewer lives.

Government has to set standards for institutions like nursing homes and hospitals and for homes where people with mental or physical disabilities are kept. They should be evacuated well before the general population. We have to decide how close we should have those types of institutions to the coastline and to areas that will probably be flooded. That part of the population is just too vulnerable.

We need to create a national preparedness plan, with a local civil defense corps. We need dual trained teachers who can be disaster responders. We need to equip each high schools with satellite communications.

We need drugstores with generators in each geographical area ... If you lose power, people can still get medicine. Gas stations along interstate highways need to have generators. We need cellphone towers that could be lowered before the storm and then raised after the storm.

For every dollar you spend in preparedness before the disaster you save $9 after the disaster.