Is Your Child's School Prepared for an Emergency? 9 Questions to Ask

A mom and homeland security expert makes the case for DIY preparedness at home and school.

IN EARLY 2005, I learned I was pregnant again. Let me state the obvious: By the third child, there is really nothing special about being pregnant. There, I said it. We were lucky. We had no problems on the whole fertility front, no medical issues. I simply braced for the inconveniences I had come to expect: weeks and months of mood swings, weight gain, the less-than-flattering wardrobe, the scheduled C-section.

As I entered my third trimester, in late August 2005, a hurricane that at its strongest was Category 5 slammed into the Gulf Coast. More than 1,000 people died as a result of its devastation. The hurricane was horrible, of course, but the week that followed was worse. The levees in New Orleans broke in several places, flooding parts of the city. Response efforts were chaotic: City, state, and federal resources were delayed, evacuation efforts were disorganized, and people who did not need to die did.

Hurricane Katrina, and the government's response, proved what was wrong with a security strategy solely built around the post-9/11 ideology of "Never Again," so often invoked to defend policies as far-ranging as the war in Iraq and the Patriot Act. Never again what? As the levees broke, we realized that we had focused on preventing terrorism at the expense of our response and emergency management apparatus. We were unable to save a city from drowning. The challenges that New Orleans faced existed well before Hurricane Katrina — systemic poverty, public-sector incompetence, corrupt police, a neglected infrastructure, including levees that were known to be inadequate. But the failures, at all levels of government, served as an important reminder that our focus on war had led us to abandon other responsibilities.

And those were the responsibilities of the Department of Homeland Security, the newest member of the federal family. Hurricane Katrina was, in many respects, DHS's first major moment in prime time. Could this agency deliver services and help when citizens needed it most? No — but not for all the obvious reasons. DHS was crippled from the start....

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