BE PREPARED: Did we take Hurricane Katrina's lessons to heart? Hurricane Rita gives a chance to test our disaster planning. "We've learned that you have to have a federal response much faster than we did with Katrina," says Greg Evans, Ph.D., director of the Institute for BioSecurity at Saint Louis University School of Public Health and a disaster planning authority. "With a large disaster like this, we can't depend only on the local authorities to respond." While authorities estimated that 1.5 million people would evacuate, 2.5 million heeded the call to action, creating bottleneck traffic conditions and even more problems in Texas. "You really have to have a better read on how people will responds to these kinds of situations, and plan accordingly. This really has to be done in advance."
MENTAL ANGUISH: A psychiatrist who has treated survivors of Hurricane Katrina who are now in St. Louis says living through a disaster takes a significant toll on mental health. "The urgency and intensity of the problems they come in with is striking," says Hilary Klein, M.D., vice chair of the department of psychiatry at Saint Louis University School of Medicine. "Some of these people were receiving less than adequate medical care to begin with."
GETTING THE WORD OUT: Have federal and municipal officials done a good job informing the public about what they need to do to stay safe during the pending hurricane? "The fact that all those people were stuck on the highway is a function that government officials got the word out better and people listened," says Ricardo Wray, Ph.D, assistant professor of community health at Saint Louis University School of Public Health. "However, it doesn't do any good to promote services that aren't available or plans of action that people can't accomplish." Wray is conducting research on how and what to communicate when disaster strikes. He also can discuss the challenges of communicating with Texas' large Hispanic population.
BACK-TO-BACK DISASTERS: The co-author of a book on preparing nurses to handle the aftermath of a disaster says the double-whammy of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita is likely to take a toll on health-care workers in the South. Nurses and doctors who have cared for Hurricane Katrina survivors evacuated to Houston probably are feeling exhausted. "They are spent and have given as much as they can," says Joanne Langan, Ph.D., assistant professor of nursing at Saint Louis University's Doisy College of Health Sciences. "After three weeks, they need to go home and refresh. That's about as max as anybody can do."
FOOD SAFETY: Kathy Kress, a food safety expert and assistant professor of nutrition and dietetics at Doisy College of Health Sciences at Saint Louis University, says ice is the secret ingredient to keeping food inside a refrigerator cool after a power outage. "Fill empty plastic gallon milk jugs with water and freeze them ahead of time to create your own blocks of ice or buy freezer gel packs," Kress says. She also can talk how to pack a refrigerator for maximum cooling, what you can save and what you should pitch after a power outage, and how to clean your kitchen after flooding.
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