By Gema G. Hernández

The failure of responding to Hurricane Katrina began not the moment the hurricane hit our shores but years before when politicians began cutting federal and state budgets needed to repair the levees and to retrofit emergency shelters. This disaster could happen to any of us as we continue to assume that our elected officials are doing what they have been elected to do: Serve and protect the people of this nation when instead they are thinking of the next election.

The congressional bi partisan committee will spend time and effort focusing on the immediate response to the natural disaster and will completely ignore the events that slowly but surely undermined the infrastructure that needed to be in place to protect the most vulnerable citizens in any given city. The events leading to the total failure were augmented when a governor or a mayor vetoed the expansion of shelters or the relocation of a highway to a safer place. These vetoes at the local, state and federal levels set the stage for a long and painful recovery process. In one word, when they veto preparation of a shelter or expanding evacuation routes they are gambling with our lives.

We Floridians know first hand what a hurricane can do to our safety, our peace of mind and our lives. We should be the first ones to demand that elected officials provide the infrastructure needed to prepare our cities and counties for natural disasters. We have the power to monitor if there are enough shelters for elders and families to be available for frail members of the community or members with their pets to evacuate at a moment’s notice. We have the moral obligation to make sure that buildings like the superdome are not used for purposes for which they were not created. It is this type of last minute improvisation that leads to the death toll we are beginning to witness. This is the improvisation that creates national catastrophes.

After surviving Hurricane Andrew I learned a number of valuable lessons, some of those lessons need money, money that it appears we would rather spend rebuilding Iraq or eliminating intangible taxes for the rich. Lessons that include the need to have enough shelters to accommodate pets, having special needs shelters designed to address the needs of elders and individuals with chronic conditions with enough generators and supplies for 2 weeks; to having in place evacuation plans for those elders and families with no means of transportation. Those lessons were translated into a survey instrument created in 1998 titled Elder Ready Communities: Communities for Life Program and those lessons were lost again in the hands of politicians who wanted to make the program a marketing tool to attract wealthy elders to our area without offering them the safety and security they require.

The congressional bi partisan committee will not look at the complete failure of the area agencies on aging and the administration on aging. Instead, these organizations will receive more money as a reward for their negligent behavior. Area Agencies on Aging in the impacted areas should have been evacuating elders before the storm hit and after the storm hit they should have been there as part of the first response team to evacuate frail elders to elder ready shelters. Area Agencies should have used the network of Senior Centers in locations away from coastal flood areas to place elders. They should have given emergency personnel the names and addresses of elders that require assistance in the performance of their daily activities, particularly those elders that were registered at the area agency. The activities and functions I am describing are part of the core mission and functions of both the area agency on aging and the administration on aging.

Failure on the part of the area agency on aging to have a list of frail elders and their locations, a list containing not only the names of the individuals but their medications, contact information for the next of kin and any medical conditions on the potential evacuees constitute a breach in their fiduciary responsibility. The same applies to the Administration on Aging.

The Bipartisan congressional committee will end the report creating another bureaucratic barrier like they did with the Office of Homeland Security. With the creation of this new elephant, they will pat themselves on the back and be ready for their next election. It is up to us to make sure the results of the investigation is not as sugar coated as the results of the 9/11 commission. The objective is not to blame but to fix things and to make sure 20 years into the future the same scenario is not repeated again. Hurricanes will continue to visit our shores, people will continue to grow older and frailer and children and families may be forced to live in neighborhoods where the levees, bridges, roads may give up at a time of a natural disaster.
Katrina has shown us what happens when investing our resources, billions of dollars worth, on other lands and forget our own domestic agenda. We should not depend on the charity of others. We should be protected by our own government, a government that has forgotten that charity begins at home.