When Uncle Dan dropped mom off at my house yesterday, he got to see my floors. I'd finished the quarter-round job over the long weekend. He said my corners looked really good; he was impressed. That was one of the best compliments I could have received. A mechanical engineer who restores houses as a hobby was impressed.

I've only been lurking on the WD lately, but I made a post yesterday on Hurricane Katrina. Cindy made a post asking who is to blame for the debacle, and I finally answered this:

I've been listening to the (non-stop) coverage of Hurricane Katrina on NPR, and my conclusion is this:

I feel really cold saying this, but people rely too much on the government to tell them what to do. It's my impression that people didn't take the warnings seriously and didn't prepare well enough. I think that if every single person in New Orleans had had an evacuation plan, things wouldn't have been as bad as they were. Seriously, if water is coming in the first floor of your house, it's time to leave. Take your extra water and food supplies and that stuff you gathered when you knew a hurricane was coming and head for the hurricane shelter.

I'm just as guilty. I've paid attention to tornado sirens exactly once in my life. My evacuation plan is basically that my parents will come and get me. Maybe a severity system on evacuation recommendations would have helped. You feel pretty stupid spending all that time and money evacuting when you don't need to, but it certainly paid off this time. One guy phoned in whose employees thought he was absoultely crazy after he formed a disaster recovery plan in response to the Times Picune's series on the effects of a severe hurricane, and they executed it several times to no end for other hurricanes. But those employees sure are glad now that they still have jobs.

I suppose it's just human nature to be optimistic, to think that it's not going to happen to them. But that's why we have life insurance, living wills, disability insurance, etc. It just makes me cringe to hear people basically say "The government should have saved me from myself." The government shouldn't have to make you excercise common sense. It should recommend that you have an evacuation plan, and should provide resources for you to form one and serve as a tool in executing it. But at some point, people have to be responsible for themselves.

Understand I'm not completely absolving government and government agencies of guilt. There are things that could have been done better. I just think it's a little unrealistic to expect the government to the be the be-all save-all.