Guest Author - Carolyn Chambers Clark, RN, EdD

What caused such a terrible result from hurricane Katrina?

According to Tallahassee Times Staff Report, Julie Hauserman, everyone from governors standing at lecterns in Mississippi and Louisiana to scientists e-mailing frantically from their university cubbyholes agrees: If we hadn't destroyed so many coastal wetlands, the hurricane's impact would have been much less devastating. And if we hadn't allowed houses and casinos and shopping centers to go up in the wetlands we destroyed, we'd have fewer people dead and a less expensive rebuilding tab.

People died because government let developers build in wetlands. And we're still building in wetlands, more and more each day. We need to stop letting government do that. We need to think about the future and be part of the democratic process and speak out against wrongs and injustices.

What do the wetlands do to protect us from coastal storms?

Wetlands are a sort of free hurricane insurance. They slow hurricanes down and absorb storm surge. State and federal officials have estimated that every 2.7 miles of wetland absorb a foot of surge. Governments don't factor that in when they weigh whether a developer should be allowed to fill marshes and put in buildings. Maybe we should point that out to our local and state governments.

What can be done to prevent further havoc from future storms?

When it's time to rebuild, we should ask whether people ought to live in houses that sit on spits of land where the government had no business letting them build in the first place. Maybe we should also ask ourselves if it's worth it to live on the water when it can be so dangerous.

According to Ms. Hauserman. Louisiana (like Florida) has been trashing wetlands in a big way. Before the dredges and cranes built the levees around New Orleans, the Mississippi River would top its banks during floods and wash through bayous and swamps. The river water carried silt to feed plants and build up new wetlands.

Now that protection is quickly disappearing. When engineers contain a river, it stops flooding and the wetlands start disappearing. This is exactly what happened in Florida. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers turned Florida's Kissimmee River into a straight-sided ditch and ended up hurting Lake Okeechobee and the Everglades, miles southward. Taxpayers have paid dearly to restore the Kissimmee's old river bends. It is far more expensive to fix broken natural systems than it is to prevent harm beforehand.

Louisiana's wetland loss is the largest in the United States, and Florida isn't far behind. Louisiana loses a football field of land every 30 minutes, reports the advocacy group America's Wetland. The state's shoreline has migrated inland 20 to 30 miles since the 1930s, says oceanographer Joe Suhayda. That massive wetland loss occurred in less than one human lifetime. If what the scientists say is true, that 30-mile wetlands buffer would have sucked up a lot of Katrina's storm surge.

Ms. Hauserman says that the government could curb and steer developments to more suitable places. Instead, it bends to developers time after time. She says that someone is getting rich from developing the Gulf Coast, and you can bet it's not the people who stifled in the Superdome or tried to plan funerals for loved ones last week in Biloxi.

When we destroy natural protections, as we're doing daily, storms will reek more and more havoc and cost more. In Florida, we'll pay $10-billion to try to restore the Everglades. It will cost at least $14-billion to restore Louisiana wetlands alone - not to mention those in Mississippi, Alabama and the Florida Panhandle. And the cost of rebuilding along the vulnerable Gulf Coast carries a multibillion-dollar price tag. But that's just money - many people paid with their lives this time.

The financial and human toll has risen because people have blindly pursued the addiction of money and growth, trashing the landscapes that buffer us from storms, clean our drinking water and grow our seafood. Wetlands are a bargain: They do all this work for free.

What to do on a personal level when a hurricane or large storm is approaching

* Collect bottles of water. Do this even when it's not storm season. Set aside a space in your cabinets, closets, garage or wherever. Every time you empty a plastic or glass milk, soda, or juice bottle, fill it with drinking water and stash it in that space.

* Instead of getting one fast food meal or eating out one lunch or dinner, put that money into buying canned goods and nonperishable food and stock away enough for 2 weeks.

* Board up your windows. You can get plywood at lumber supply stores. Measure your windows and purchase the nails and wood and have it in your garage or basement. If you can't use boards, tape them to protect against shattering and draw drapes across windows and doors to protect against flying glass.

* Make a contract with a friend in another state that you can go to their home if a storm comes to your way and vice versa. Even though storms don't always go where experts say they will, it's better to leave your house and risk a false alarm than risk danger or even death.

* Move boats and trailers close to your house. Fill boats with water to weight them down and lash both securely to tie-downs.

* Have important documents in one place and keep them with you.

* Store matches, candles, flashlights (and batteries) or lamps in case you lose electricity.

* Make sure you have a radio that uses batteries and listen to it if you lose electricity.

* When you move into a house or apartment, inventory your possessions. Take pictures of every room. Keep this information with your other valuable papers and update it when you buy new things. This will help with insurance claims later.

* Plan your route to safety early, before storm season. Check with Civil Defense for low points and flooding history of your route.

* Never let your vehicle gas tank be less than half full during storm season and fill up when a hurricane watch is posted. Remember: When there is no electricity, gas pumps won't work.

* Stay indoors until the all clear is given. Never go outside to "see what's happening" during or after a storm. After Katrina, the TV showed many people walking through debris-covered roads and byways.

* Stay away from windows and glass doors during the storm. Stay in a place with the most inner walls during the worst of the storm. A closet is good or an inner bathroom.

* Have a first aid kit with you and know how to use it.

* Have a suitcase packed with warm, protective clothing to take with you if you have to leave.

* After the hurricane or storm, dangers like dangling power lines, snakes and poisonous insects, weakened roads are still a danger.

What to do now and in the future to protect our valuable wetlands

* Write your local, state and federal representatives (including the President) and tell them you want wastelands protected, that we can't afford to lose anymore of them, and that building near the shoreline is dangerous and haphazard.

* Join a group, such as the Sierra Club to learn more about how to protect wetlands.

* Search on the Internet for ways to protect wetlands and be sure to act on what you read.