With daily reminders of global warming, impending pandemics and murderous homegrown terrorists, the media provides us with all we need to know about looming disaster.

There's the startling rise in antibiotic-resistant superbugs, anticipated death tolls from a bird flu pandemic, to the neighbourhoods most likely to be levelled in a major Canadian flood, quake or fire.

We've heard it all. Or have we?

A largely untold story lurks behind what we've heard in much of this modern doomsday reporting; a story that should shock our aging baby boomers out of their self-absorbed complacency: the horrifying plight of older people when large-scale disaster hits -- a plight boomers want to avoid in the years ahead.

Hurricane Katrina provides a ready example. Ask the ordinary man or woman on the street what group of people was most affected by Katrina, and 99 per cent will likely say: black, disadvantaged people, of course.

Despite popular perception, that's not entirely true. As noted by internationally known U.S. age critic Margaret Morganroth Gullette, based on death toll numbers, those who fared the worst were old people (black and white alike).

Although they constituted only about 15 per cent of the population, 60 per cent of the identified Katrina victims were over 60 years old. Seventy-eight per cent were over 51. Overwhelmingly, older people were the ones killed, yet Katrina is known as a race and class story.

To be sure, one or two tragic nursing-home events did get heavy media play. However, nursing-home deaths accounted for only 10 per cent of the total fatalities.

What happened to the rest? Why haven't the media -- or advocate-cum-filmmaker Spike Lee in his epic Katrina production -- told us about them?

We know that some were abandoned by their families, but we don't know much more. And, if almost 80 per cent of the victims were over 51, why was racism the chief "ism" on everyone's lips following the event? Is this not an in-your-face case of ageism?

The stark reality is that in most modern-day disasters, old people are consigned to the scrap heap in the rescue and relief efforts. Within 24 hours of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, animal advocates were on the scene rescuing pets, yet abandoned older people waited up to seven days for ad hoc medical teams to rescue them.

Discrimination prevented scores of older survivors from receiving food and medical care after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. In the 2003 France heat wave, 15,000 mostly elderly people died alone in their homes or in care facilities while French families sunned themselves on the Greek isles. (The media couldn't miss that one.)

How is this relevant to us, you ask? We're civilized Canadians. We love our grandmothers and have few hurricanes. Our heat waves aren't usually severe.

It is relevant because, for one, our Katrina will come. Whether it's a major earthquake on the Pacific coast, severe ice storms, floods or fires, bioterrorism or another SARS, a mega-disaster affecting Canadians is inevitable.

So the question becomes: Will our Canadian elders fare better than did their counterparts in New Orleans and France?

In a few short years, what the United Nations has dubbed the "age quake" will be upon us. Baby boomers will start turning 65.

Won't our 10 million Canadian boomers be in for a surprise when they realize that younger people patronize them and assume they're slow on the uptake just because they no longer look 35?

Won't they be surprised when doctors don't take their complaints seriously; when they can't get a job because no one wants to hire them or they are forced to retire from a job they need; when they are considered unattractive by those around them and dirty if they own up to having sexual feelings; when the media ignores their stories out of lack of interest? Won't they be surprised when they see that the youth-obsessed culture they've created through their complacency isn't so kind to them after all?

In emergency situations, everyday prejudices can turn deadly. And prejudices are mirrored in laws and policies -- such as emergency response protocols -- and people's readiness to adopt and follow them.

So how will Canadian elders fare in whatever ultimately becomes our country's Katrina?

Until we as individuals and as a society can look in the mirror and say that we value older people as much as everyone else -- that we truly believe they have as much dignity and right to live as the young -- I fear we cannot expect anything other than another New Orleans.

The boomers had better find their Spike Lee and they had better find him or her quickly, or their golden years may not be so golden after all.

Melody Schalm is a lawyer and writer living in Vancouver.