[Mb-civic] The future is now - H.D.S. Greenway - Boston Globe

[William Swiggard]

The future is now

By H.D.S. Greenway  |  September 13, 2005

DURING WORLD War II my mother was an air raid warden. Oh, not in burning 
cities such as London or Warsaw. She was a warden in the suburbs of 
Boston where bombs never fell. She, and others like her, wore a Civil 
Defense armband and a whistle, and were on the lookout for saboteurs as 
well as enemy planes. If there had been an air raid or an act of 
sabotage, she would have known just what to do. It all may seem a little 
silly now, but real saboteurs were landed from submarines in Maine and 
on Long Island.

Later, as the Cold War dawned, she maintained a walled off corner of our 
basement as a bomb shelter that would have saved us only if the atom 
bomb burst very far away. But she had it stocked with canned goods, 
bottled water, flashlight, batteries, bandages, and other things that 
could tide us over until some semblance of normalcy could be restored.

Everyone of my generation remembers ''duck and cover" drills in which 
school kids got under their desks and covered their heads in the event 
that Russian planes should come to deliver World War III. Much fun has 
been made of all those long-ago precautions. As if ducking and covering 
could help in a nuclear holocaust, scoffers said. But if the blast had 
been far enough away not to incinerate us, but merely bring the school 
house down around our heads, ducking and covering might not have been so 
silly as it later seemed.

I am recalling all this because of an article I saw in The Wall Street 
Journal entitled: ''Lessons From the Flood: Sales of Emergency Kits Jump 
As Katrina Prompts Families to Reassess Disaster Plans." An article on 
the same page headlined ''A Medical Checklist" recommended just about 
everything my mother used to stock in our bomb shelter.

Maybe some of the other precautions this nation took in those days might 
not seem so ludicrous now that we are seeing an entire city evacuated. 
Scientists have long warned that global warming will produce ever 
greater and more powerful storms -- made all the more dangerous because 
so many people now live so close to the coasts. Then there is the ''big 
one," the giant earthquake that will someday come to California -- made 
worse because so many people live on the great faults where earthquakes 
sleep, awaiting their time as subterranean pressures grow.

And in the back of every American's mind is the haunting question: What 
if terrorists let weapons of mass destruction loose in one or more of 
our cities?

It wouldn't be a bad idea if civilians, like my mother, had a bigger 
role to play if disaster comes, if they knew what to do and how to help. 
When official responders are overwhelmed, as they were in Katrina, if 
there were more civilian air raid wardens with whistles who knew in 
advance what the evacuation routes were and how to get the old, sick, 
and poor out from under, with the rudiments of first aid at their 
disposal, maybe the damage inflicted in the next one could be mitigated.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/09/13/the_future_is_now/
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