Disaster preparedness. Disaster can take so many forms. What sort of disasters do you prepare for, and in what way? How severe? Is there any way to be truly prepared?
Based on your physical circumstance or political leanings, you can see the above questions differently. The reason I decided to write on this today is a confluence of two things. Another blog I follow has suggested we need to be prepared for some collapse in our culture — that person isn’t sure whether urban or rural will fare better in the possibilities she sees. The second thing is another FB friend who like a page of Bug Out Bag Planning. I read that, and it made me think about the planning my family has or hasn’t made.
The one thing all these things have pointed out to me is how few plans most people make, and how much of their plans rely on some sort of government network to take care of things for them. But what if emergency services themselves are impaired or compromised. You know the saying, “when seconds count, the police are only minutes away.”
Our most recent power outage, about 16 hours long, shows just exactly how passive and dependent we are upon the utilities themselves to resolve the situation. We had water — because our public water supply is separate from the electric service — but everything else operating in the house was unavailable. What would we have done if things had gone on longer — like the several days we had a few years ago in our other house. Standby generators at Home Depot always look a lot better after an outage — though not their price tags.
But how many things in the house do we really need to run on electricity in an emergency? As I pointed out to the family, we have an electric converter for the car that we used on camping trips that powers a regular socket. We could use that to run the freezer or refrigerator for the short time we need to keep things cold and preserved in them. And to cook we just need to have some propane on hand for the camp stove.
Of course, that assumes we have food on hand, or a place to get it, and that we have gasoline for the car. The problem with this disaster planning — you never know exactly what is going to be missing, or what is going to be unavailable to know what you should stock up on. Should we have a small reserve of gasoline on hand — say a couple 5 gallon cans, to be able to fuel the car for these eventualities? How much food of what type should we have as storage? Should we have bottled water? how much?
For something to drink, if a crisis came, it wouldn’t be the most healthy, but we wouldn’t have to worry about dehydrating too soon. I have several cases of soda cans on hand — my own personal stock that I use one or less a day as a treat.
Back to that gas for the car. It could be for fueling the car to power what we need at the house. Or it could be “bug out” fuel, to get out of the city. Which leads to a whole new set of questions — what do we take with us? where do we go? what do we do once we get there?
What happens if we don’t have the car, or fuel for it? Suddenly the bicycle takes on new importance as a means of transportation. It is amazing how slow foot travel is, and how unused to walking our culture really is. Gone is the “5 miles is just a good stretch of the legs” days.
What do people do who live near coastlines do, how do they plan, where do they evacuate when a hurricane is coming? We have tornadoes here, but you don’t exactly flee them, you hit the cellar and hope things are still there when you come up. But that is its own crisis.
Are we planning for a natural disaster, or a human disaster, a societal breakdown.
I think, in the “final” analysis, there is no way to know which crisis, but one can certainly look around, think up possibilities, and see what one might be able to do. My work place has disaster recovery sites and disaster recovery plans. Most people don’t have anything of the sort for their families and personal lives. We really need to take responsibility for ourselves, for our own. I certainly hope government is there to help, but sometimes they won’t be there for minutes, when seconds count. At the minimum we need to make plans to cover that gap.
And if each of us makes plans, even if we guess the wrong crisis, we will be better off than if we had made none at all, and will also be in a better position to help those around us.
At The Rainbow 