I drove over to Charlie’s Truck Stop this past week to pick up a few groceries and to check in on the guys that sit around the pot belly stove. When I drove up, I saw the guys sitting out front on the long wooden benches that frame the front entrance. It was a pleasant day and nice weather for sitting out. Jake was propped against one of the new gas pumps with a coke in his hand. The Reverend Johnson was sitting on one of the benches and Ned Simpson and Ronnie Clayton were parked on the other. Jake looked up expectantly when I pulled into the parking lot as to see if I was going to want to fill up with gasoline, but he settled back into position when I stopped my car to the side of the store.

I climbed out and wandered in the direction of the gathering of Charlie’s Regulars. Ronnie piped up if I had any rain over the weekend and I replied I had a little. Ronnie said he had a tree come down in his front yard. Come the near miss from what remained from Hurricane Katrina a few weeks back and his electricity did not even flicker, then we get a couple gusts of wind from the far edge of Rita and the big oak in his front yard comes down. There’s just no figuring the weather.

The good Reverend said most of the news reports he had heard indicated this recent storm was not near the disaster some of the weather people were predicting. To hear some folks tell it, the evacuation from the Galveston Houston areas was worse than the storm itself. The Reverend was of the opinion that these two recent storms out of the Gulf were meant as a demonstration to those of us willing to take heed of the limits of the power of the government to jump in and save us in a time of crisis. The Reverend believes the two landfalls give us a demonstration of the two kinds of response possible from the federal government in a large disaster, with both of them mostly ineffective. In the case of Katrina, it was mostly business as usual with the feds waiting until the storm had passed to come in with the recovery effort. In result of the major disaster in New Orleans, there was a lot of bad press to that procedure. So, when Rita came up, the government jumped right in with both feet to show how prepared the government is and the consequence was major traffic gridlock with hundreds of thousands of people trying to move out of the path of Rita. There is just no telling what might have happened if Rita had taken the path to landfall that was predicted early on.

The Reverend was coming to the point he was planning to make which was that there are some things of which governments are just not up to. Governments are not God and we need to understand the limits of governments from two perspectives. First off, while a bunch of bureaucrats sitting off in Washington may be charged with taking care of things in a disaster, it is to them in the end just a job. It is not a matter of immediate life and death. It is not their property on the line. In the second place, even with the best of intentions, there are real world limits to the powers of government to avert the threat of a major storm. If you are going to choose to live in the path of a possible major hurricane, you had best prepare yourself as best you can and ask God for His help in time of crisis. If the government happens to be able to come to your aid, then all the better.

Ronnie had been wanting to put in his opinion through all this long monolog and he finally had his chance. He pointed out that, while New Orleans was hogging the national headlines with the very real tragedy of a flooded city, it was Mississippi that got hit broadside by Katrina. New Orleans was a near miss, and a disastrous near miss at that, but Mississippi was a direct hit. The full force of the storm came up through the center of the state. Mississippi did not make the headlines because the government agencies set up to step in on a condition of crisis were on their toes. They knew what needed doing and they did it. While the state officials in Louisiana were in the media complaining about slow federal response was to the disaster, the Governor of Mississippi was at work making certain the response in his state was as rapid and efficient as it was possible to be and the Governor’s wife was out in the trenches getting her hands dirty and helping with the rescue and clean up. Ronnie thinks the people in Mississippi were just too busy to pass the time whining about real or imagined slow federal response.

Ned Simpson supposed one of the reasons the Governor was soft on the feds id he is also a Republican just like the President and it would not look so good for him to be complaining about the President from his own party. Ronnie let that pass without comment as though he felt Ned’s opinion was not worthy of response. But he did suggest he thought the New Orleans ordeal was to a large part man made. The residents of New Orleans have known for generations they are living in a danger zone. The city has suffered floods before of various kinds, one back in the sixties that put part of the city under water. That should have been a wake up call at the time. There was, in fact, a mass evacuation from New Orleans before Katrina, something like eighty percent of the city population and the evacuation went much more smoothly that the gridlock out of Galveston and Houston. People who did not evacuate complained there was no time or they had no transportation on short notice, but the hard fact is New Orleans had known for generations the city lived with danger. There were no barb wire fences surrounding the city to keep people in if they felt the risks of staying were greater than they wished to accept responsibility for.

The Reverend Johnson is of the opinion that both Katrina and Rita are messages from God telling people along the coast it is time to get ready for the time when a big one takes a direct hit on a major city. The people who are not up to the responsibility should move inland. Those who wish to remain should have working survival plans in order. Those people who believe the government will take care of them are living in a dream world.

END