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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.
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.
Mod me troll. I don't care.
I've got a M1 rifle, a 12 gauge pump and a Colt Python as personal weapons.
That and a backpack full of gear I can live out of and a 4x4 that's already been up the Rubicon trail many times.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
There are about a dozen cans of squid, that I have no idea where they came from.
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
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.
The only thing we probably have to seriously worry about, is the disaster after the disaster.
If there is some cataclysmic quake/tsunami on the West Coast, I can imagine plenty of people showing up here shortly afterwards. We are not prepared to deal with a mass influx of Californians.
I guess my survival pack would include:
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
I am not prepared.
"my cat would make a fine hat for warmth"
your cat can knit?
A post a day keeps productivity at bay.
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. :)
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...
When in danger,
or in doubt,
run in circles,
scream and shout.
-- Xavier Onassis, Director of Emergency Preparedness
Have gnu, will travel.
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!
Home:
40 cu ft Pantry full of food
5 gal jug filled with dried beans
5 gal jug filled with rice
8000 sqft backyard garden (mostly root crops this time of year)
5 x 5 gal jug filled with drinking water
half a cord of Firewood + ax and bow saw for collecting more
Several sacks of charcoal
Spare tank of propane
Box of candles
Large first aid kit
Iodine tablets
Fire extinguisher
Deep cycle battery + trickle charger + inverter
Large toolbox full of tools
Rechargable flashlights in every bathroom
A fireproof safe, bolted to a concrete floor, containing:
Original copies of important documents
Several USB drives with backups
Cash, other valuables
AR-15 assault rifle + 500 rounds of ammo + cleaning kit
pockets:
cellphone (the lcd screen can be used as a flashlight)
fine tip sharpie pen
on keychain:
4GB USB thumb drive
mini leatherman (scissors, knife, tweezers, screwdriver)
screw top tube containing:
needle+thread, safety pins, waterproof matches,
asprin, antibiotic pills
trunk of car:
Jumper cables
flares
First aid kit
Water
Breakfast bars
plastic bags
duct tape
epoxy glue
needles / thread
parachute cord
pliers
screwdrivers
scissors
$200 in twenty dollar bills
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.