"We rely on technology and we end up thinking as human beings that we’re totally safe, and we’re not." Says Dennis S. Miletti, a scholar on disaster prevention at the University of Colorado. "We live on a very unsafe planet."

As reported in the L.A.Times on September 4: More than 2.5 billion people were affected by floods, earthquakes, hurricanes, and other natural disasters between 1994 and 2003, a 65 percent increase over the previous two 10-year periods, according to a U.N. study. These numbers do not include the estimated 180,000 people killed in last December’s tsunami in the Indian Ocean.

Miletti continued to the Times: "We're building our communities in ways that aren’t compatible with the natural perils we have.”

What lessons can be learned?

Lesson one: Uncapped population expansion in high-weather-risk areas increases risks to humans—and wildlife. In Florida, California, and the Carolinas, coastal communities have become saturated with housing developments. People tend to assume that someone else is taking care of potential emergency matters—highway infrastructure, back-up communications, aid. But as the experiences in New Orleans and Biloxi show, someone else often doesn’t do the job.

The L.A. Times further reports that an Army Corps of Engineers Lt. General Strock said on September 2 that the government had known the levees could never withstand a hurricane higher than a Category 3. Katrina was a Category 5. Federal, state, and local officials "rolled the dice."

A second lesson: Occasional near disasters lead to real ones, sooner or later. Here in the Sierra, earthquakes, winter storms, and devastating forest fires are known features of the area. Any one of them—coupled with the existing, two-lane road system and a peak-population day or weekend—could produce the kind of human tragedy experienced this week along the Gulf. Think back to last winter's gridlock during the Christmas holidays, or to the New Year's floods of early 1997. The circumstances here above 6,000’ are compounded further by the on-going, limited capabilities for effective communications on local matters. The inability to move information around was a major contributing factor in New Orleans this week. Following the recent sewage spill, the North Lake Tahoe Resort Association had a chance to test its 'crisis communications plan.' It has since been formally adopted, but it's focus is primarily on outgoing PR, not emergency communications. In a true emergency situation, how will people know what's going on?

A final lesson: Effective regional planning—for emergencies or life in general—must transcend arbitrary political boundaries and officials’ terms of office. It is traditional for office holders to take care of the now, rather than the tomorrow when someone else will be in the chair. Climatologists appear to be reaching agreement that global warming is intensifying floods, heat waves, drought, and storms of all kinds.

Truckee and the North Shore of Lake Tahoe are joined at the hip and the shoulder. Their fates are intertwined. "Locals" owe it to themselves to work together on their joint tomorrows; leaving them to someone else down the hill in Auburn or Nevada City is unnecessarily rolling the dice.