Sheri Fink

If you ever face a significant disaster, do your best to keep up the spirits of those around you, act flexibly and creatively to help, try to sort rumors from truth, and remember that the decisions you make will have repercussions after the disaster has passed.

Having worked in disasters, I have seen that, in those critical first few hours, those first few days - so much ends up riding on you and your neighbor and whoever is around. The official response always comes later, and it always feels like it comes too slow.

When Katrina struck in 2005, roughly 300 deaths were recorded at hospitals, long-term care facilities and in nursing homes, according to a recently published study of death certificates and disaster mortuary team records. Many of them might have been saved if they had been evacuated sooner.

I am not only the person who wrote and sold a novel while raising a houseful of biological and foster children; I am also the person who wrote a horrific young adult novel that never sold and gave up on a foster child I couldn't handle - an experience that still haunts me.