EDITORIAL KATRINA REVISITED DISASTER'S LESSONS MUST NOT BE FORGOTTEN.

FOR most Americans, this week's one-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina comes as something of a media distraction -- a break from the nonstop coverage of JonBenet, Tom Cruise and next season's ``Survivor'' shtick.

For residents of the Gulf Coast, it's just another day.

In the year since one of America's worst natural disasters struck, their lives have been one constant reminder of last summer's horrors. They don't need the commemoration of an anniversary to jog their memories or jolt their consciences.

The rest of us, on the other hand, do.

We need the reminder of the 2,000 lives lost, the millions more uprooted, and the devastation of one of America's great cities.

We need to see the images of nature at its most awful, and government at its most inept.

We need to recall the suffering that didn't stop just because the cameras went away, and the victims who still need our help.

The lessons of Hurricane Katrina are too great to be forgotten -- especially for those of us in Southern California, who know that our next natural disaster isn't a matter of if, but when.

And what Katrina taught us is that we had better get prepared. We need to demand that public officials take the threat of disaster seriously, and prepare to deal with certain crisis -- all the while taking our own precautions, because they probably won't.

But Katrina also taught us that even after tragedy, there is hope. The scattered residents of New Orleans have created new lives elsewhere, while heroic if fitful efforts are under way to rebuild the city and the region from its rubble.

One year later, Hurricane Katrina remains a reminder of the frailty of life, the dangers of our world, the failures of government at all levels -- and the indomitable sense of hope that no tragedy can extinguish.