not the end of the world emergency planning

[flowerseverywhere]

there was a recent thread in Food and Recipes about six months of food storage. If things get so out of control I have no access to any services, water or food for six months I like most of us will be in trouble. However, that is no excuse to not be prepared for most of the situations we could face, and someone posted a link to a great blog where someone who fled Katrina has posted lessons learned.

http://www.theplacewithnoname.com/blogs/klessons/index.html

If you had to leave your home, would you have access to the documents you might need to prove your identity? copies of your health insurance cards? Do you have pictures of your belongings for insurance purposes in case of flood, fire or theft, and do you know how to contact them? If you got stuck in your car could you keep warm, have some water until you could get out? If you lost your wallet do you know how to contact your credit card company, health insurance company etc? If an Ice storm, hurricane, tornado, flood, earthquake etc was in your area and you did not have access to power, food being delivered could you survive a week? If you have a baby could you feed and diaper them for a week if you had to without leaving the house?

A lot of the things you can do to protect yourself are not high cost - and most of us can do them. So let's get started. Anything I didn't think of?

By the way, after Katrina most people said loss of family photos was the worst- so I scanned in every photo in our house over a period of a month and gave copies on disc to my kids and sibs. We also have all of our important documents scanned and in an outside the house location.

[shadowmoss]

I came by that site via another angle, and started putting his advise into practice. I took the recent mention of it as a prod to complete the process. He has an awesome site there, and detail step by step instructions that everyone should follow.

[Gregg]

We store scans of important docs, family pics, property pics for insurance, etc. on a secure site and on a portable hard drive. At any given time we have several months of food stock in the house (most in the fall after canning season, least in the spring).

One of the most interesting times for us came during a major snowstorm. It was 5 days before our local supermarket could be resupplied. I always heard that markets usually have about a 3 day supply in stock, but now I believe it. The shelves were BARE by the 5th day! We were fortunate because the water still ran and the power stayed on, but it was an eyeopener as to just how fragile our supply system in this country is.

[kib]

One thing that got me thinking was when he said you could make yourself crazy detailing what sort of "zombie attack" you were up against, so just don't even go there. Pushed me to acknowledge that there are, to me, two very different kinds of crisis: the kind where you're stuck where you are but your resources are suddenly limited (or the money supply you depend on collapses) and the kind that's more localized: your possessions and home are suddenly destroyed or unavailable to you. "bugging in vs. bugging out". And it made me really "get it" as far as understanding my own anxiety. If I had to bug out and I made it safely out of the danger area and had access to my money, I could live in a hotel eating restaurant food ... um ... well ... about as long as my natural life is expected to last. OTOH, if I had to live where I am and the food or the gas or the money suddenly disappeared ... oh dear oh my. It really made me stop and think in terms of the idea that it's time to diversify my assets - you can't eat dollar bills, as they say. This isn't something new for me, but for some reason this brought home to me how protected I am in one way and how vulnerable I am in another.

[flowerseverywhere]

When we lost power for three days it took us a while to figure out how to make coffee. We also did not have a battery powered radio so had to sit in the car for news. Finally we had batteries and a neighbor had a radio so we were able to listen to news. It was scary.

[Gina]

Living in earthquake and fire country, I'm somewhat prepared for emergencies. We've had to evacuate twice the past few years because of wildfires. I take these threats seriously since in the past 2 decades almost 1,000 structures have been lost in our area. In our wildfires, they can start in the distance so you often have enough time to pack. But not always. You also really get to know which of your possessions have great importance to you, and which do not.

One thing I now do is keep my car half filled with gas so if I have to go.... I also keep water in the car, and a wind-up flashlight. I also have a windup radio, but I keep that in the house. It rarely gets cold here, but if it did, I'd keep something warm in the car too. I usually wear tennis shoes, but if I didn't I'd keep a comfy pair of shoes in the car too.

http://www.simplelivingforum.net/attachment.php?attachmentid=152&d=1294385703

[Gingerella72]

I like that site because of the practical advice....so many disaster/survival preparedness sites focus on end of the world - global catastrophe - "zombie" (lol) situations that in all reality *won't* happen. But, most of us will probably encounter much smaller, local catastrophes like house fire, tornado, storm power outages, etc that are much more likely to happen. It's amusing sometimes to let your imagination run wild and think about how you would fare in a post-apoclyptic world, but it's much more realistic to have a "bug out" bag with everything important in it ready to grab on your way out while fleeing from your burning down house that was caused by faulty wiring.

[RosieTR]

Yep, interesting. I would have the most difficult time with a random house fire at night: do I get my contacts or wallet? The latter floats around so may not be accessible. Other than that, I usually have a backpack stocked with stuff for frequent hiking adventures which I could just grab. I carry a first aid kit, space blankets, food, water purification pills, fire starter, extra clothes at all times. That would be the fastest thing to grab other than my wallet. Staying in would be OK except water. In the low AZ desert, water is paramount and if the taps stopped working we'd be faced with: our rain barrel (level varies) or jumping the fence to get to the neighbor's chlorinated pool. We aren't friends with them so they could just as likely shoot us as not for something like that. I know where a few other water sources are in the area that are bikeable but I'm sure the rest of the city would be going there as well. If there were some nasty virus you wouldn't want to congregate. Water is definitely something to think about here, and maybe I should plan not to use the rain barrel water down too low.

In general, I'd probably either have to leave in 60 seconds (house/building fire or the nuclear power plant blows) or hole up but possibly without services for awhile (super-bad thunderstorm, virus). The latter happened every about 4 years when we lived in CO and had a blizzard, though we didn't usually lose power or water. What I hadn't thought much about was communicating with DH about what to do if major problems happened while one or both of us were at work. Something to talk about so we don't try driving around half of Phoenix looking for each other if cell service were shut down, something that happened in NYC during 9/11 and possibly also during the big power outage a few years later.

[Jemima]

One thing that got me thinking was when he said you could make yourself crazy detailing what sort of "zombie attack" you were up against, so just don't even go there. Pushed me to acknowledge that there are, to me, two very different kinds of crisis: the kind where you're stuck where you are but your resources are suddenly limited (or the money supply you depend on collapses) and the kind that's more localized: your possessions and home are suddenly destroyed or unavailable to you. "bugging in vs. bugging out". And it made me really "get it" as far as understanding my own anxiety. If I had to bug out and I made it safely out of the danger area and had access to my money, I could live in a hotel eating restaurant food ... um ... well ... about as long as my natural life is expected to last. OTOH, if I had to live where I am and the food or the gas or the money suddenly disappeared ... oh dear oh my. It really made me stop and think in terms of the idea that it's time to diversify my assets - you can't eat dollar bills, as they say. This isn't something new for me, but for some reason this brought home to me how protected I am in one way and how vulnerable I am in another.

A few years ago, on this forum, someone recommended a book to me entitled Fear Less by Gavin De Becker. I believe at the time I was breaking into cold sweats about Peak Oil. This book really helped to put disasters and emergencies into perspective. The book was inspired by 9/11, but covers far more than that. It made me feel *lots* better and I think it would alleviate some of your anxieties. (Just drop by my mud hut and I'll lend you my copy.) :~)

This article has also had its effects on me. I just realized that while I'm prepared for being stuck in the house for weeks due to some emergency or other, I'm almost totally unprepared to leave the house quickly except for the cat carrier being only a few feet from the front door and a (now probably frozen) partial bottle of water in the car. I think I'll spend some time tomorrow packing a bag.

[RosieTR]

Going deeper into the blog, the whole analysis of government is very interesting. You can take the lessons of Katrina and apply them to the housing bubble/bust and the analysis is the same. For example, he notes that government is basically a popularity contest, run by people who don't necessarily know what they are doing and aren't necessarily prepared for something like disasters, but that in the end it goes back to what the people want which is short term and inexpensive fixes to whatever seems to be a pressing problem. 20 years from now both Katrina and the housing bubble will probably be a faint memory, and sometime in 20-40 years there will likely be a hurricane that wipes out part of New Orleans (happened in '65) and a bubble of some sort (there were bubbles in the '60s and of course the '20s). Yet another reason to HYST and not depend on the govt to bail you out if something happens.