Slashdot Mirror
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.
talking about data how safe are the data centers / cables that link them? How long does the on site fuel last? (with out refill?) even if they have refill plans that fuel may get pulled and sent to other places that need it and the data center may have no say in that.
Jump kits (Go bags)
You put 'em by the door for when you have to rock'n'roll.
http://www.sff.net/people/doylemacdonald/emerg_kit.htm
Bug out bags are nice but having a place to wait out a dangerous situation is ideal. BOBs aren't a panacea to surviving a disaster.
Backpack Fever addresses this concern and encourages people to be realistic before grabbing their SKS and going innawoods.
Japan Tsunami = massive natural disaster - GUN TOTING POPULATION -> no looting & roving gangs -> no murder, assault -> no need for way to "protect" self and family Thai Tsunami = massive natural disaster - GUN TOTING POPULATION -> no looting & roving gangs -> no murder, assault -> no need for way to "protect" self and family See a pattern here?
Blankets and sleeping bags.
Nonperishable food items (canned veg, dehydrated or canned soup with long shelf life, rice, flour, etc).
Drinking water. (Get a few of those water-delivery jugs, fill them up when your region gets a hurricane warning).
Flashlights, matches and candles for light. In addition to the long-lived "safety" candles, I have a few bags of cheap tealights.
Ample supply of firewood/charcoal and a grill or firepit to cook with. Having both isn't bad - they're both usable any old time.
Some rope, tarp, hammer and nails won't hurt you.
If you're in a hurricane region, it won't hurt to install some locking flip latches and measure some plywood to cover easily-damaged or large windows. Beats having to repair the window after a hurricane and you don't have the "nail holes in the house" problem after. The flip latches will hold the plywood down perfectly snug.
A few board games and books just so you don't get fucking bored as hell.
Radio (either crank powered or stock spare batteries) so you can get weather and news reports.
There you go. Sure, there are people who will suggest a bunch of other crap, but that's the basics. If you're someone who goes camping with any regularity, you should have at least half of this crap on hand already.
My wife and I like to stay fairly well prepared.
First, our home. We live in a very rural area, on the side of a treed mountain. We built our home last year, and it's passive solar, sited to take maximum advantage of the sun, built very tightly (LEED gold-ish, but we didn't bother to get certified). We maintain the forest, have large piles of wood in rotation being seasoned, and keep a large stockpile of planked wood on hand (milled from the trees on our land). Our neighbors have cows, goats, and sheep, from which they produce milk and meat—handy to have When The Shit Comes Down®. (I use that phrase facetiously—it's a generic term that my wife and I use to refer to anything that may or may not happen in our lifetimes that would disrupt supply chains, limit movement, or otherwise require short or long-term independence.) We paid a few thousand bucks to have an enormous propane tank buried next to our house, in which we maintain a two-year supply of propane. Soon enough we'll have a propane generator, a few solar panels, and a small windmill, which should allow us to maintain ~1.5 kWh of power during about half of the day, but make it possible to peak to 5 kWh when demand requires (until the propane runs out, and then we top out at 1.5 kWh).
Second, food and water. We always keep about ten pounds of oats, twenty pounds of flour, ten pounds of sugar, ten pounds of rice, and ten pounds of dried beans on hand. We always have 20 gallons of fresh drinking water stored, 55 gallons of rainwater, and we maintain a spring. Also, we have a stream. We have a small flock of chickens, a horse, and we're about to get ducks. Six months out of the year we have what's either a large garden or a small farm, and we put up a lot of food in the fall. Not enough to get us through a winter, but we do alright, and feel confident that we could ramp up production significantly, if need be. We save our seed, so the notion of increasing the size of our garden by tenfold with four months of lead time (seasonally depending, of course) isn't totally unreasonable.
Third, medical. We've got potassium iodide on hand (there's a nuclear power plant ~35 miles from us), a dose of Tamiflu for each of us, two very complete medical kits, moderate training in first aid (with more coming soon—see below), and we generally maintain a three-month supply of our medications.
Fourth, general supplies. We have an oil lamp (and, of course, lamp oil), a bunch of candles, several fire extinguishers, a NOAA radio, a hand-cranked AM/FM/shortwave radio, matches, lighters, a flotilla of batteries of all sorts, headlamps, and flashlights. We keep a couple of canisters of propane on hand (rotated through annually, thanks to grilling season) and have a propane heater that can heat our entire house for a couple of days with one of those plugged in.
Fifth, evacuation preparedness. We keep a 72-hour pack by the front door, ready to go, with a couple of hundred bucks in cash, a few days food, tinned water, flashlights, blankets, tarps, matches, fire starters, and so on. We've got sleeping bags and internal frame packs on hand for each of us. The idea is to make sure that if sheltering in place isn't safe, that we can leave without delay.
Finally, a flotilla of books (not all of which we've read, I admit) on wilderness medicine. This Tuesday we're starting an eight-week Community Emergency Response Team training course (held just once a week). This is available in most areas—google around to see if you can take it in your area. That's where you can learn to be helpful in an emergency, rather than somebody who needs help—learn to use a chainsaw, direct traffic, suture a wound, lead a panicked group of people to safety, etc. Recommended highly.
I've come to relish when we lose power in good weather. It's a chance to test out our plans. There are a lot of basic aspects to preparedness that would just never cross your mind until you actually need to carry out that plan. You know how, without power, you keep flipping light switches every time you walk into a room, or thinking "well, I'll just google that...*DOH*"? The same applies to all kinds of things, like having candles...but no matches. :)
2 Lifted Trucks (well, one's an xj cherokee but it's mostly plate steel nowdays) - Check
Generators, Gas pumps - Check
Guns - Check (M1, M1A, AR15 (magpul bling and an acog), and an STI Edge in 40sw)
But something i'm really most proud of is my server, If human society stopped existing, I've got a backup of books, wikipedia (text only), obligatory media backups etc etc on a 10tb array in a seismic rack [2tb wd blacks and a 3ware 9550 in raid 6 fyi]. And that's relieving to know, that if a guy like me has atleast SOME of humanity's knowledge on backup, there's bound to be hundreds more just like me if the worst DOES happen.
Sorry, Rant off. TL;DR -- I just like being a little prepared, everything else are my hobbies anyway. 4x4'ing, camping and shooting.
obligatory xkcd that points out the basic problem: It works for 1 guy, it doesn't work for everybody.
I am officially gone from
There are millions actually, most states are experiencing overpop problems. Not to mention the domesticated animals (cows, chickens) roving around the countryside. And since their food supplies will be less affected than ours, the wildlife will likely be better off than the humans are.
And there really wouldn't be a horde of people would there? On the scale of event you seem to be talking about, the city-dwellers likely wouldn't make it out of the concrete jungle, and they wouldn't know where to start in terms of hunting strategy, food prep and storage. The only people who think hunting is "easy" are people who haven't done it. Guns are tools used for more than just self-defense.
Of course, it couldn't have anything to do with culture, could it? The Japanese, for the most part, have a culture where you do what the authorities tell you to. If they tell you to wait in lines, you wait in lines, and as politely as possible. Heck, they don't even have to be told. You want to know the reason the Japs aren't running around looting shops, and why random citizens even go so far as to help 70 year old shop keepers clean up? Look at their culture. Even if they had the freedom to own weapons, it wouldn't change the culture.
Even if the looting Katrina thugs didn't have guns (and, most of them didn't), it doesn't change the fact that some minority of people chose to loot liquor stores, just because they could... It would have been forgivable, to me, if they looted because they needed the nutrition, but no, they went after all of the unnecessary things in life, like booze, and electronics, and everything else not bolted to the floor--because not only was there nobody there to stop them, they could not stop themselves!
Then, you have Brits. There's more of a rebel attitude amongst the younger generations. And, despite not having guns, there's also a prevalence of violence. Roving bands of thugs who beat people up, and for no good reason, robberies at knife or truncheon point--that sort of thing. So much so, that London has considered banning knives with sharp points. If only that would stop the bloodshed, but it will forever be the next potential weapon, and it will never come to going after the cultural issues. Furthermore, If & when some innocent person decides they're not going to be the victim of the day, the government takes a most peculiar stance: they'll probably hold the victim liable for any pain and suffering put upon the aggressor by violent retaliation, and to add insult to injury, they're just as likely to prosecute the victim with some arbitrary and arcane statute, as they are to prosecute the assailant for that particular crime--despite the victim having no record, and the assailant(s) having rap sheets miles long.
What's similar between these cultures? They're both island nations, they both have very stringent gun control laws, yet one has much less violence, on the whole, than the other? Why do you imagine that is?
If the government could be put out, you know, to actually go after and prosecute criminals instead of peaceful, law abiding citizens, we could both enjoy our freedom, and enjoy not having to worry about criminals. What would be wrong there? Oh, that's right, some people would still choose own relatively simple machines YOU don't think they should own. But, there's always *some* excuse for wanna-be authoritarian dickheads, isn't there?
Posting from Christchurch New Zealand. I can talk about a data center here. The recent earthquake was the second one. We had a first one last September.
Last September the UPS lasted until the diesel generator kicked in. There was never any downtime, that includes the BlueGene/L. Not sure how long the fuel was meant to last but it was enough.
February's earthquake was another matter. There is now a 5mm wide crack in the middle of the data center (extends about 20m on each side of the building). This generated dust, the automatic system were triggered as for a fire and air conditioning was cut off immediately and then the systems were shutdown automatically in the next five minutes. The gas to extinguish fire was not released, we are not sure why yet. The fuel was not useful at all last February.