Home 04 Sep 2005 07:16 pm
emergency preparedness: the shoppening
Josh and I went to REI today, during their Labor Day sale, to pick up various supplies for our jump bags. There are still things to gather up, but we’ve made an excellent start on the bags. As have many other people; the water purification section in particular was jammed.
I think emergency kits ought to be distributed at food banks, along with instructions and information in various languages. I wonder who could make that happen, or if it has already been proposed.
There was one New Orleans resident I’ve heard about — though I couldn’t tell you where — who realized after about four days of dehydration that he and his crew could get water from hot water heaters. Four days. None of them had known.
I’ve been wondering, too, about neighborhood preparedness. It would be great if everybody in the neighborhood knew some first aid and had basic supplies. Hell, it would be great if everybody knew everybody’s name. We need more block parties. Preferably with more of our neighbor Paul’s astounding baklava.
Updated to add: In Seattle, SDART is the ” all-hazard personal and neighborhood preparedness program.” It organizes neighborhoods to respond to disasters. They have (had?) a disaster preparedness fair every October that they call “Disaster Saturday”.
on 04 Sep 2005 at 8:14 pm 1.Adrian said …
What all did you end up including?
on 04 Sep 2005 at 9:28 pm 2.Josh said …
See my latest entry for details.
on 05 Sep 2005 at 4:52 am 3.Joy said …
I am making a list of all of my friends and their conctact information – aka updating my address book, really – and then I am going to ask Uly for a page on the gothhouse server to put it. If you’d like a copy when I get it collected, that would be cool. I don’t want to put it on a public page, but I’m not sophisticated enough in terms of protection/encryption to be comfortable trying to set up password access, etc.
Ideally – and again, this notion is only sort of half-formed in my head, and I doubt I have the webskillz to implement it properly – I’d like to have a page where anyone could come and log that type of information – best of all would be if they could say something like ‘hey mom, if there is trouble all my contact information is at blahblahblah.org and you can leave me a message there too.’ Sort of like the adhoc LJ groups and message boards a lot of places have been offering only prepared ahead of time and persistant. Of course then you get into privacy issues to, if I’ve suddenly got this giant database of emergency contact information or something…
But, back to current reality, yes. A list of friends, where they are, how to get in touch, an emergency contact, pertinant medical information – that one is a biggie that I haven’t entierly dealt with.
on 05 Sep 2005 at 8:09 am 4.Wim said …
I have the SDART booklet; it’s full of nice practical information about how the city hopes to have people respond to disasters. Lots of block-level procedures and advice for getting things locally stabilized for a few days until city-organized help shows up. (The pamphlet assumes that there will eventually be officially-organized help…)
I have this booklet because a while back Seattle sent a letter to every amateur radio licensee in the city encouraging us all to get involved in the ham emergency-response organizations (RACES, ARES, etc) and describing how the city’s emergency response relates to those. I do intend to get involved with that, right after I get, you know, a radio.
Anyway, one thing about the city’s plans is that it assumes a reasonable amount of capability and competence on the part of the residents. The ham radio aspect is an example: the theory is that if something knocks out communications, then there’s a good chance that a few radio operators will be within runner range of any given point. So the city has detailed plans and procedures and designated meeting points for assembling an emergency radio net, getting the ham net talking to the right people in the city, and (perhaps most important) getting the radio net operators talking to the other people in the affected neighborhood. I assume that there are other groups being prepped to handle other ad-hoc services.
This is all very good. Make use of every resource available. The self-reliant city and citizen. Etc.
However, if something like Katrina were coming for Seattle, a disaster with warning, I’d be out of here. Lots of people would: in fact, probably exactly the same people who are resourceful enough to have made plans to cope with a disaster and help their neighbors in a disaster are the people who got out of New Orleans while the getting was good. The everyone-for-themselves evacuation of the city kind of guaranteed this. And you can’t return to help people later, because the army will shoot you if you try.
So I wonder if things would, paradoxically, have been better if there hadn’t been any warnign of Katrina’s arrival. (Disband NOAA and NWS! Down with the weather satellites! okay, maybe not.)
on 07 Sep 2005 at 3:54 pm 5.A Consumer Reports... said …
Emergency Preparedness
In an emergency, consumers may not realize some obvious solutions. Check this report:…