The future is now

DURING WORLD War II my mother was an air raid warden. Oh, not in burning cities such as London or Warsaw. She was a warden in the suburbs of Boston where bombs never fell. She, and others like her, wore a Civil Defense armband and a whistle, and were on the lookout for saboteurs as well as enemy planes. If there had been an air raid or an act of sabotage, she would have known just what to do. It all may seem a little silly now, but real saboteurs were landed from submarines in Maine and on Long Island.

Later, as the Cold War dawned, she maintained a walled off corner of our basement as a bomb shelter that would have saved us only if the atom bomb burst very far away. But she had it stocked with canned goods, bottled water, flashlight, batteries, bandages, and other things that could tide us over until some semblance of normalcy could be restored.

Everyone of my generation remembers ''duck and cover" drills in which school kids got under their desks and covered their heads in the event that Russian planes should come to deliver World War III. Much fun has been made of all those long-ago precautions. As if ducking and covering could help in a nuclear holocaust, scoffers said. But if the blast had been far enough away not to incinerate us, but merely bring the school house down around our heads, ducking and covering might not have been so silly as it later seemed.

I am recalling all this because of an article I saw in The Wall Street Journal entitled: ''Lessons From the Flood: Sales of Emergency Kits Jump As Katrina Prompts Families to Reassess Disaster Plans." An article on the same page headlined ''A Medical Checklist" recommended just about everything my mother used to stock in our bomb shelter.

Maybe some of the other precautions this nation took in those days might not seem so ludicrous now that we are seeing an entire city evacuated. Scientists have long warned that global warming will produce ever greater and more powerful storms -- made all the more dangerous because so many people now live so close to the coasts. Then there is the ''big one," the giant earthquake that will someday come to California -- made worse because so many people live on the great faults where earthquakes sleep, awaiting their time as subterranean pressures grow.

And in the back of every American's mind is the haunting question: What if terrorists let weapons of mass destruction loose in one or more of our cities?

It wouldn't be a bad idea if civilians, like my mother, had a bigger role to play if disaster comes, if they knew what to do and how to help. When official responders are overwhelmed, as they were in Katrina, if there were more civilian air raid wardens with whistles who knew in advance what the evacuation routes were and how to get the old, sick, and poor out from under, with the rudiments of first aid at their disposal, maybe the damage inflicted in the next one could be mitigated.

The gold standard for a cadre of trained civilians is the Coast Guard Auxiliary, many of them retirees with valuable skills to donate along with their time. Auxiliarists, as the Coast Guard calls them, can be found in every Coast Guard facility in the country, manning phones and radios, cooking meals, doing office work, and going to sea as well, performing every conceivable non-combat or law enforcement role the Coast Guard is assigned. Some donate their boats -- even aircraft -- along with their time. It is arguably the most successful volunteer program in America, and the Coast Guard could not function without them.

If similar organizations of civilians who knew in advance what to do in an emergency could be formed along Coast Guard lines to aid the understaffed and under-budgeted Federal Emergency Management Agency, the nation's security could be enhanced. Trained volunteers backing up law enforcement professionals could leave the pros free to enforce the law, for whether it be Baghdad or Biloxi, looters will always exacerbate a catastrophe.

Now that responsibility for Katrina relief has passed from a hapless head of FEMA to a Coast Guard vice admiral, a former naval officer with long experience in national security planning, Gene Porter, sent along this suggestion to me: ''How about transferring FEMA's responsibilities, people, and budget authority to the US Coast Guard? They could expand their existing excellent response practices nationwide using their quasi-military methods and considerable legal authority."

H.D.S. Greenway's column appears regularly in the Globe.