New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, whose city was left devastated by Hurricane Katrina earlier this year, is nothing if not quotable. But a Friday statement from Nagin, while colorful, exposed the mayor's lack of understanding of governmental hierarchies.
Here's Nagin, speaking to about 1,500 local officials at the annual National League of Cities meeting, quoted by the Associated Press on the much-maligned federal response to the hurricane: "Everybody in this room should be concerned. Everyone knows there's a certain amount of constipation in Washington. We need to be the Ex-Lax to bust through that."
That's not the prettiest picture ever painted with words. But Nagin does have something of a point. Municipal governments like his, along with other local and state governments, have every right to expect the federal government to mount an efficient and effective response to disasters like Hurricane Katrina, which wreak havoc across wide swaths of the country. It has been estimated that the effects of Hurricane Katrina were felt across 90,000 square miles of the United States, an area encompassing hundreds of county and municipal jurisdictions in the Gulf Coast states.
In its wake, the hurricane left those counties and cities with little or no base from which to build an effective rescue and rehabilitation effort. In such situations, the federal government clearly has, or should have, a lead role in disaster response.
But that doesn't mean those municipal and county governments shouldn't also have a significant role in preparing their communities for disasters.
Hurricane Katrina - and Hurricane Rita, the storm that followed Katrina in bringing significant damage to the Gulf Coast - carried a lesson for local and state governments. The lesson was that those governments have a responsibility to their citizens to have workable plans in place so that they can be pro-active in the face of disaster.
Nagin's city had days of advance notice that it would likely feel the effects of a major hurricane. If a truly workable disaster plan had been in place in New Orleans, at least some of the human misery that dominated media coverage of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina might have been avoided.
Nagin was right to suggest the federal government might need some prodding to beef up its disaster response capabilities.
No one in this country wants to see their fellow citizens doing without food, water and other necessities in the wake of the next hurricane to make landfall.
But Nagin and other officials at all levels of government below the federal level should also use the months between now and next year's hurricane season to take stock of their own disaster preparedness, and to tweak and adjust plans where necessary.
Those plans should, at a minimum, include detailed strategies and contingencies for timely, fast and orderly evacuations, with particular attention paid to the sick, the elderly and those without personal transportation. Such plans should also ensure a reasonable continuity of law enforcement and emergency services, including provisions for quick and effective search and rescue operations.
State and local leaders in disaster-prone areas such as the Gulf Coast would also be wise to begin coordinating with their counterparts in neighboring states and regions, to help ensure that disaster evacuees will have access to food, shelter and clothing when they are out of the way of immediate harm.
While this year's hurricanes did point out clear inadequacies in federal disaster response capabilities, they did the same with regard to those capabilities at other levels of government. It's now up to those governments - federal, state and local - to apply the lessons they should have learned.