What Emergency Plan?

Every emergency plan I've ever seen takes care to set special procedures for hospital patients and others not able to fend for themselves. New Orleans' plan certainly does:

Special arrangements will be made to evacuate persons unable to transport themselves or who require specific life saving assistance. Additional personnel will be recruited to assist in evacuation procedures as needed.

Yet 45 bodies are found in a hospital in that city. Officials of the hospital say it was the heat that killed them:

... the attorney general said he is investigating the discovery of more than 40 corpses at flooded-out Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans. A hospital official said the 106-degree heat inside the hospital as the patients waited for days to be evacuated probably contributed to the deaths.

If they had been evacuated before the storm, when power was still on, the temperature in the hospital would not have been 106 degrees, and this tragedy would not have occurred.

Similarly, in Katrina's other great tragedy, it appears the owners of the the St. Rita's nursing home, who now face 34 counts of neglegent homicide, may have been victims of St. Bernard Parish's failure to implement its emergency plan. Their attorney said:

"[The home's owners] sat and waited for a mandatory evacuation order from the officials of St. Bernard Parish that never came," he said.

Cobb said the Manganos were forced to make a difficult decision as the hurricane approached: evacuate the patients, many of them elderly and on feeding tubes, or keep them comfortable at the home through the storm.

There's two sides to that tragedy, and obviously the Manganos' attorney will try to put the blame on the city. Still, it appears that strong implementation of the plan would have saved these souls.

This is not a bash NOLA post. Here's my point:

I hope my home county -- which prides itself on efficiency but blundered its way into bankruptcy -- is watching what's going on in NOLA, and I hope your county is, too. I hope they've got sweat trickling down their backs and are asking themselves some hard questions about their preparedness.

We're whistling lullabies in the storm if we think the thumb-twiddling, paper clip-counting government workers of our hometowns are that much better than those in New Orleans.