In Case Of Emergency, Read Blog

With hurricane season beginning today, I thought I would highlight a new public awareness campaign from the State of Louisiana called Get A Game Plan (www.getagameplan.org).

In many ways, the Louisiana citizen preparedness campaign is like those of other states and localities — encouragement along with information. However, there is one aspect of it I wanted to mention. When you land on the site, you are greeted with the smiling face of the state’s new chief executive and the words ”Governor Bobby Jindal has one”. The “one” is an emergency plan. 

If preparedness is going to take hold among the public, it needs to have leadership and buy-in from their top elected officials. Without it, individual citizens will take an implicit and explicit cue that preparedness really isn’t all that important. In fact, I believe the lack of high profile attention to the issue by political leaders is a major reason for the anemic level of public readiness.

Ideally, the Get A Game Plan site would go into much more detail about what Jindal’s family plan exactly is and how he did it — as well as whatever the obstacles he found. Of course, a governor with a security detail is not going to have an evacuation plan that most citizens can model after. That said, we need more political leaders taking on the issue of preparedness in a high profile and personal way.

(The other lead spokesperson on the site is Louisiana State University football coach Les Miles, who may the most popular man in the state in part because he didn’t ‘evacuate’ when Michigan offered him their head coaching job.)