Remembering Katrina Five Years Later

Five years ago today Hurricane Katrina was approaching the Gulf Coast.

It was a Sunday. I was at home that morning getting ready to go to Meeting for Worship at the Friends (Quaker) Meeting House in Louisville.

I had the TV on and I was watching the news. Suddenly there was live coverage of a news conference featuring the Mayor of New Orleans who was ordering a full-scale evacuation of the city.

When he paused to take questions, one of the reporters in the room asked him how his evacuation plan dealt with people who didn't have cars.

The Mayor said, in essence, that the city hoped that churches would use their buses to go around and pick up people who were homebound and didn't have cars.

As I listened to those words I said out loud to myself, "Oh my god, thousands of people are going to die tonight."

Sadly, I was right. The city didn't have a plan and nearly two thousand people died in New Orleans and other places on the Gulf Coast.

Hoping that churches (or other religious groups for that matter) would help with the evacuation was a pipe dream. Planning to include houses of worship and their transportation resources could have been helpful. But mere hopes proved disastrous.

As I look at the weather channel this morning, there may be one or more hurricanes headed our way.

I pray that no hurricane hits a populated area in the US or anywhere else. But I fear that neither New Orleans nor any other major metropolitan area has any serious plan for evacuating the homebound when a hurricane or some other disaster threatens.

I would like to see houses of worship be part of any evacuation plan and would like to help bring people of different religions together to respond to emergencies. I just don't know where to begin. If anyone has an idea, please share it with me. I'll pass it along to everyone else.