.........good luck to Josh! How about that hurricane stuff?

I heard from a good friend of mine, Josh, via "the blog" over the weekend. He is on his way to Brigham Young University in Salt Lake City, Utah where he will be a graduate student. Based on all the information I have seen, all is going well. He, his wife Megan, and daughter Isabella will get settled soon. All my best wishes and prayers go out to them for safe travel and a great life in Utah while Josh gets his degree.

On a different note, tomorrow is the one year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina hitting the Gulf Coast area. My family and I love New Orleans. We try to visit once each year. There have been numerous programs on TV about the hurricane, all that happened during the storm, all that has happened as a result of the storm, and whose fault is was for everything that went wrong. I saw one of those shows on Discovery last night. I thought it was fairly objective in the blame department. As many of these shows are, this one centered around what happened in New Orleans. Based on the information that I have gained through the media and from people I have talked to person-to-person in New Orleans, many are to blame. It was a total breakdown of many jobs and responsibilities. FEMA has managed many hurricanes with success throughout the years, but never really imagined that anything would be as catastrophic as that of Katrina. Too many things went wrong to react and fix them all. Who is to blame? I think of it like this - I learned a great lesson from my Army Drill Sergeant in 1984. He gave me the task of taking some men in my squad out to a classroom building where I was to have them pick-up all the trash and rake the sand (the Army is big on raking sand). I got the men there, assigned them their tasks, and told them to return to the barracks area when they were done with the job. I left and awaited their return. Sure enough, about two hours later, the men returned and told me the job was done. I reported it to my Drill Sergeant. He went to the area to inspect, because he was responsible for the job completion in the first place. He took me along for the inspection. The job was not finished. Trash was present, and the sand was not raked as assigned. I was punished. The lesson learned - assign tasks and delegate; but, check to make sure it has been done to the standard expected. I think many tasks were given for the hurricane relief effort in New Orleans, but very few checks were made to see that tasks were complete. I'm sure my Drill Sergeant should have been in charge of this process. I'll speak more of the mess in New Orleans later. My only hope now is that they can rebuild their shattered lives.