Once final rescue and recovery efforts are completed in New Orleans and Mississippi, it might be a good time to look at the emergency management plan for your home town.

Here are a few:

San Francisco
Boston
Los Angeles
Dallas
Detroit (which has a 10-point plan!)
Chicago
Miami-Dade County
Philadelphia
Charlotte
Kansas City
New York City

And, if your city or local government doesn't have it posted online, you can obviously call and ask for their emergency management plan. And if they don't have one, obviously, that's another set of questions.

Even if you don't find one for where you live, there's still Ready.gov. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security was ridiculed for duct tape when it first rolled out its emergency planning guidelines, but those guidelines also had some common sense information like this:

Getting Away

There may be conditions under which you will decide to get away, or there may be situations when you are ordered to leave. Plan how you will assemble your family and anticipate where you will go. Choose several destinations in different directions so you have options in an emergency.

And there was much more detail on planning your personal evacuation that you can read.

But if where you live doesn't have a well-publicized, easy-to-understand emergency management plan - custom-tailored to the local geography and setting - now is the time to demand one. Not when there are bodies in the street.

For example, Long Island, N.Y., where between 3 million and 4 million people live, is doing more to publicize tax-free shopping week than its coastal evacuation routes in the middle of a hurricane season. (Although Nassau County does a much better job than Suffolk County.) They can now plan on hearing from at least one local resident about this first thing tomorrow morning.

Read the emergency management plans above. The quality plans stand out and if there is a pattern that seems to emerge it's that the cities that have had the unfortunate experience of managing a catastrophe seem to have the best plans in place. (Los Angeles, New York and San Francsico are good places to start.)