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Ask Slashdot: How Prepared Are You For a Major Emergency?
The northern US has been buried under snow several times this winter, and flooding has struck quite a few places in the southwest. Those pale, though, beside the recent disasters in Haiti, New Zealand, and Japan, and the seemingly inevitable arrival of a serious earthquake on the West Coast of the US. All of which has me thinking about my (meager) preparedness for a major disaster. Despite plans to stock up in case of a major storm or other emergency, right now I'd be down mostly to canned beans, sardines and Nutella. How prepared are you to do deal with a disaster affecting your region? Is your data safe? What about your family? Do you have escape, regrouping, or survival plans in the event of an earthquake, tsunami, hurricane, industrial accident, or whatever hazards are most relevant where you live? It would be helpful if in comments you disclose your region and environment (urban? rural? exurbs?) and the emergencies you consider worth preparing for, as well as talking about any steps you've taken or plan to take.
Got some food that will last a while. My house has a creek that runs behind it and plenty of wood, so we can start a fire and boil water. When the food we have runs out, I have a hunting rifle with almost a full box of ammo, a shotgun with plenty of bird shot, and a handgun(more of use against unwelcome bipedal creatures than for hunting), so I can kill plenty of critters for food. And this is suburban Atlanta. Really, in an emergency situation, I could care less about data and all that. My biggest concern is feeding and protecting my family. It's pointless to make sure your pictures and tax records survive an emergency if you don't.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
The best preparations are knowledge and experience.
Learn to camp. Join the Boy Scouts or similar when growing up. Learn to fish. Learn to hunt. Go on hikes. Take a first aid course.
Learn to be calm in the face of a completely unfamiliar situation.
You can't really plan for an unexpected event, but you can train yourself to react rationally in unfamiliar circumstances. Having a tendency to improvise a solution will get you much further in an emergency than any preparation for a specific circumstance.
Bit of a silly response, don't you think?
OP talks about preparing for a natural disaster
What you going to do, shoot the water as it swirls round your feet
<sarcasm>Yeah guns are really important, just look at all the japanese right now, without their guns they are really screwed.
I see them respectfully/calmly queing for food and water, it would be much easier if they were all just shooting each other.</sarcasm>
dumb fucks... :-/
It's not troll, it's paranoid. What sort of disaster are you expecting wherein you would need those kinds of weapons? There aren't many realistic scenarios of that type.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Nonsense. There are plenty of countries without roving gangs of armed thugs. It just depends on how much effort the government wants to put into making a country gun-free. Enjoy your constant fear of armed robbery though - it sounds like a good life.
How many ducks and deer do you think there *are*? If there was an actual disaster, the deer, duck, quail, and lizard populations would plummet as a teaming horde of well-armed people suddenly ravage the landscape.
We moved to an agricultural society so that we wouldn't have to try to eke out our existence on the little tidbits provided by nature. Wanna prepare? Fine. But don't think for a minute that there will be lots of game waiting for your bullets.
Guns are for self-defense.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
If you are waiting until the tragedy happens to be getting out of dodge, then you are a victim waiting to happen. Ever see a full scale evacuation of an urbanized area? Gridlock is an outcome of panicked people trying to leave an area. Good luck with that strategy.
I work emergency management and can tell you from personal experience, the US will be rode hard and put away wet if a catastrophic incident happens today. We don't have the financial capabilities to deal with it and the "something for nothing" crowd we got for politicians these days will cut it even further.
This is a sig. This is only a sig. Had this been an actual sig you would have been informed where to tune for more sigs.
Nowhere in your diatribe did you mention helping anyone in need. You are one sick fuck.
Ever cleaned game? Wildlife around urban areas tend to be freaking nasty. Mangy, diseased, bony... Not a lot of deer around my city. Not a lot of wild boar either. So you may end up eating rats and bugs. Make sure that you don't puncture the rat intestine and spill rat feces all over that delectable rat meat when you're cleaning that rat. And rats, though they may grow to be large, are still rats and not much more meat than a single drumstick.
Say all you want about a can of pork and beans or tuna, but I'd much rather eat that than a squirrel. And yes, I've eaten rabbit, deer, wild hog, and snake before... I've never eaten rat though.
Even if the diesel is available the traffic snarls up bad. If the data centre is inside a region badly hit the officials will close the area to everyone for their "safety" even if the building is safe. Our IT support continued to work because it was in another city. The building in Chch our office was in had the MSB (a diesel was there too I think) in the basement, which flooded. No doubt that is where the rebuilt MSB (main switchboard) will go. And god, it takes so long for anything to progress.
In a situation where radiation is a factor, and could be concentrated by the food chain, queueing up sounds better and better. Let's assume you are a decent marksman and the disaster you are dealing with hasn't hit during really cold weather when everything lairs up as much as possible, and you know enough to spot Tularaemia in rabbits and so on. We'll also assume you have some non-meat food sources too and won't get a protein overdose related psychosis.Those assumptions mean you know more than many legendary mountain men, let alone many modern hunters.Do you really know radiation well enough to make the smart decisions there too?
Who is John Cabal?
Arguably, the hardocre apocalyptic gun-toters know that they don't really need survival kits: All they need is a list of nearby people who have survival kits, and their existing supplies of guns and ammunition...
Cthulhu waits.
In the cans.
In your cupboard.
C-x C-s C-x k
Be wary of Backpack Fever
Much better to shelter in place and be prepared to live where you are. The notion of fleeing to the hills is common, but foolish.
Is it me or does this entire thread seem to state that Americans are preparing for natural disasters by arming up and getting ready to play real life MW2 with their neighbours?
You know, I call my emergency plan "The Apocalypse Plan" or "The End of the World Plan"
The plan is distributed throughout my group of "survivors". Three meeting points, with the plan for the final destination are included.
Supplies include weapons and plenty of ammunition, food (MREs, water, water treatment, etc), clothing, personal supplies (toothpaste, toilet paper, feminine needs), medical supplies (basic first responder kit), and vehicle supplies (extra gas, spare parts, etc).
And of course, people ask "Why weapons?" Well, since this world is such a kind gentle place, it'd be perfectly safe walking or driving through a group of desperate people with enough supplies to live a few weeks on. Oh ya, you wouldn't be safe. Beyond that, you may (and likely will) need to use them for hunting when the food supplies run out.
If it is a prolonged period of civil unrest, you may find weapons your best friend. Well, I guess the best friend is the person who can use the weapons most efficiently.
The meeting points are staged along a predetermined evacuation route. Multiple routes are provided to each waypoint. Each waypoint was chosen for relative isolation, access to fresh water and wildlife, and access by car, large vehicle (bus/large truck) and aircraft. So you should be able to walk, drive, or fly there (there are a few licensed pilots in the group).
We all know the parties who should be able to arrive, so once the entire party has grouped at one of the waypoints (hopefully the first).
Distance to the waypoints and regrouping times (how long we wait) is based on at least double the walking time. If it takes an hour to drive, or a day to walk, we give 3 days. So waypoint 1 would be 3 days (E+3d). Waypoint 2 would be 2 weeks (E+17d). Waypoint 3 would be another 2 weeks (E+31d).
We plan to add shortwave radio to the plan. Right now, we only have one licensed operator. Not that licenses matter much in a state of emergency. When your region has just been leveled by a natural disaster, having the FAA show up to fine or arrest you would be welcome. "Fine, arrest me. Get me out of here."
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
There are 300 million people in the US. How long do you think 20 million deer will feed them? Of course, short of an incredibly major disaster, all 300 million of them won't simultaneously be needing the deer, but by the same token not all 20 million deer are going to available to the subset who do. "Oh, but my area has a low population density!" Great, that just means that statistically you're even more likely to get competition. Most like a much larger percentage of your neighbors have guns and no how to hunt.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
My strategy is to live in Toronto. We never get any snow (according to my standards) or hurricanes. It's geologically stable, so no quakes. No major dams to burst, or rivers to flood. It's bland and boring. The worst disaster to hit these parts was the blackout of 2003, and even that was more or less over in about 8 hours.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Ahh, thank goodness for the simple pleasures of a vegetable garden.
May the Maths Be with you!
Of course, it couldn't have anything to do with culture, could it?
Sadly, saying this is like shouting into a hurricane. Even more so, because it's the real root of the issue and most people are incapable of analyzing people and cultures to find the real cause to problems; they'd rather just demonize those they disagree with.
Owning firearms makes one more likely to be a criminal in exactly the same way being black makes one more likely to be a criminal. It's too bad the real meaning of the preceding sentence will be lost on so many, a great deal of whom will decide it means I think blacks are criminals because they're black. It's that old /. maxim "correlation does not equal causation," but let's not apply it to everything, just the things we like, but which have bad things that correlate to them. Anything else might as well be "correlation equals causation" for the average person trying to defend a strongly-held opinion.
If such a huge disaster happens you'll probably just die anyway, and if you don't, what's left of it is probably going to suck. It's such a waste of a good life to live it in fear of what *might* happen. Lighten up and increase the quality of your current life instead.
My other account has a 3-digit UID.