A lesson in humility, category five level: an ode to the value of preparation ... and prudence.

There was a time when I considered myself an unusually wise and generous person. In particular, I knew all about hurricanes.

Understanding what an asset those characteristics were to the community, I freely shared with readers of the Mobile Register what they should do before, during, and after a hurricane. ("Think before you leave," I instructed in a column a few months ago. Hurricane Ivan in September 2004, with its traffic jams and stories of people sleeping in their cars because motels across the Southeast were full, had confirmed the wisdom of "staying put" even when experts advised otherwise.)

Being so smart also imbued me with an ability to Monday-morning-quarterback politicians' and emergency planners' preparations and responses. Thus, after Ivan devastated the Florida Panhandle instead of south Alabama, I explained in a column that our governor had made a mistake when he ordered a mandatory evacuation of coastal Alabama south of Interstate 10.

As I pointed out, there's a big difference between homes on the Gulf of Mexico and neighborhoods twenty-five miles inland.

"Next time," I chided, "the governor will want to choose his words more carefully." Our editorials agreed.

The governor, apparently, did not.

In fact, when "next time" came in July of this year in the form of Hurricane Dennis, darned if governor Bob Riley didn't order the same sweeping evacuation of the same overly broad area.

Once again, the hurricane went elsewhere. Once again, Alabama had cleared its coast for nothing.

Honestly, some people just never learn.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the rest of this year's hurricanes. A massive storm named Katrina swamped New Orleans and coastal Mississippi, killing more than a thousand people.

In Katrina's wake, governors who espouse a "better safe than sorry" approach to hurricane evacuations are now visionaries, and know-it-all opinion writers are now the ones who will want to choose their words more carefully.

Indeed, instead of rejecting emergency planners as people who always cry "wolf" and dismissing all politicians as hacks in search of a photo-op, we will want to remember that hurricane preparations by their nature are based on probabilities and possibilities, not certainties.

We will want to remember--and to remind our readers--that it does not matter that a hurricane hasn't struck a community in forty years, or that this or that building "survived Camille" or another catastrophic storm, or that the past three or four evacuations were for naught.

Katrina's lesson for planners, politicians, and pundits alike is that we fail our constituents if we don't focus on the fact that because every hurricane is unique, every set of preparations has to be uniquely tailored to the storm at hand.

In the aftermath of Katrina, Americans learned that New Orleans' planners had no plan to find and evacuate people who couldn't fend for themselves. Americans also learned that over the years, Louisiana politicians ignored reams of scientific evidence that New Orleans' destruction was only a matter of time.

As for pundits, at least one editorial page editor and columnist situated a hundred fifty miles east of New Orleans learned what the ever-quotable Benjamin Franklin meant when he wrote, "Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other."

Giving voice to an entire region's outrage

Terri Troncale, editor of the editorial page at The Times-Picayune in New Orleans, told me once that she believed she was born to be an editorial writer. A couple of weeks ago I reminded of her of that in an e-mail, saying that The Times-Picayune editorials post-Katrina were proof. She replied that the storm had caused all of her staff to write with passion. That passion infused their editorials with an authority that couldn't be ignored, from calling for the dismissal of Michael Brown to pleading for New Orleans' right to be rebuilt to scolding those who exaggerated lawlessness. I think they gave voice to an entire region's outrage and influenced the national agenda, in part because the editorials also colored, prompted, and informed editorials at other newspapers. I think they were an affirmation of the role of editorials in public decision-making.

Fran Dauth, editorial page editor, The Star-Ledger, Newark, New Jersey

Frances Coleman is editorial page editor of the Mobile Register. E-mail fcoleman@ mobileregister.com