Tag Archives: kit

Emergency Supplies Renters Need to Have On Hand

 

The Red Cross has an online store with emergency supplies. (Image: Red Cross)

With a 7.7 earthquake to the north at Haida Gwaii and Hurricane Sandy working over the East Coast, it feels like a good time to have Arne (@nwquakes) talk with emergency management expert Carol Dunn (@caroldn) about a higher-risk group: renters. Part 1 is here

What’s a good strategy for getting together emergency supplies in your apartment, given that you don’t have a lot of spare space?

Storage space can be a problem in rental units, but you shouldn’t make that an excuse not to have backup food and water. Find ways to make it work. Remember, disaster supplies are simply things you own that are useful in disasters. A lot of people’s mental picture of disasters supplies involve shelves of specifically bought supplies gadgets kept in a shed or garage—that actually isn’t the best way.

You should try to make disaster supplies part of your everyday life. Your goal is to find a way to have backup ways to get water, food, medicine, heating, information, and light. The best way to do it is to see what you already have. Designate some space to let you pull your supplies together. This can be a shelf in a cupboard, or under, behind, or inside a piece of furniture.

Tips for Supplies

A demonstrator from Puget Sound Energy shows a man how to safely turn off a utility meter. (Photo: Seattle Red Cross)

Water: Store water either by buying multi-gallon water jugs or by filling cleaned soda bottles with water. Learn different techniques for purifying water. If you don’t have a water heater (which is a good source of emergency water), find out how your building provides heated water. Often there are large central water tanks that hold hundreds of gallons of water.

Talk to the management company or building owners about their plan for a water emergency. Who has access to the tanks? How can residents contact the manager/building owner if none of their representatives are on site during the emergency? Your goal should be to have a gallon of water per person per day for at least three days, but it’s best if you can store even more. It is a lot of water, so be clever in how you store it. Don’t let the large amount give yourself permission to put off doing it. Store what you can to start with.

If you are filling your own bottles, be sure to refill them every six months: tap water can in fact “go bad”; that is, it can get contaminated by bacteria over time. If you have any reason to worry about the quality of your water, purify it before drinking it.

Food: Energy/snack bars and nutritional drinks are easy to store emergency food.

Medicine: Insurance/Medicaid rules often make it difficult to have back up prescriptions. Get in the habit of requesting refills the date you are allowed to request them and not when you are running out. Also keep a list of prescriptions, doses, and the number of your doctor and your pharmacy in your wallet. It is possible to get emergency replacements for prescriptions that were lost due to a disaster. Having the ability to provide information about your medical needs will speed up the process. You can also request replacement prescriptions by going to a public health clinic or an emergency shelter and talking to their staff.

You should get together some first aid supplies in case of injury. Bandages, gauze, aspirin, disinfectant, tissues, plastic gloves, soap: They’re all compact, inexpensive items you’ll need if you get injured and help can’t reach you and you can’t reach help.

Heating: Blankets, sweaters and hand warmers can provide safe heating. Avoid heaters that generate fumes of any sort. In long-term power outages normal ventilation in buildings no longer runs, so air is not moving. Over time, this can make non-electric heating devices, like propane heaters or camp stoves, dangerous—even if their labels say they can be used indoors.

Information: Keep a battery or crank radio handy so you can get information about the location of shelters or emergency food and prescription replacement. If you have a car, consider buying an inverter so it can charge phones and laptops. Emergency information in our area is usually available on local radio stations (often AM 1000, or FM 97.7 or 97.3), online at www.rpin.org, www.seattleredcross.org, and most city government websites, or by calling 211. Keep a paper list of phone numbers for the people and services that are important to you.

Lighting: Use flashlights, glow-sticks, or battery- or crank-powered lanterns. If using batteries, have spare batteries on hand.

The Earthquake Prep Details You Haven’t Thought of Yet

In Part 3 of this series (Parts 1 and 2), The SunBreak’s Northwest Earthquake Correspondent Arne Christensen asks John Schelling (@jdschelling) of the Washington Emergency Management Division about the earthquake preparation details we haven’t thought about. 

Arne has also written a previous series on earthquake preparedness in the tech sector, and the psychology of readiness. He also maintains this Nisqually Quake site, which collects stories on the subject. 

Could you share some information about the contents of your preparedness kit(s), especially anything that most people wouldn’t think to have in their kit or anything especially useful for earthquakes?

I like to think I have a pretty well stocked emergency kit for our family, and we keep part of it near the garage door, which most people use when they enter or leave our house. When visiting for the first time, friends and family take notice of the week’s worth of stored water for 3-4 people and politely joke, “Looks like you’re ready for the big one,” and I look at them quizzically and say “Yep, aren’t you?”

This usually leads to a discussion about what one should have in a disaster preparedness kit along with some encouragement to not let the rest of the week go by without putting at least one thing into a bin as a start. Putting together an emergency kit is easy and can be done on a budget! In fact, I suspect that many people will have most of these items already. However, they may be consolidated into some type of container in case they have to leave quickly.

Essential items should include: a battery-powered or hand-crank NOAA weather radio, at least a 3-day supply of nonperishable food (I like the kind that can be served on paper plates or in paper bowls requiring no water for cleanup!), a first aid kit, at least a week’s worth of medications and any necessary medical supplies, sanitation items and a portable shovel since you might need to dig a hole outside (don’t laugh, this is how folks in New Zealand did it for awhile last year), copies of important documents in a waterproof container, emergency blankets, pet supplies, if applicable ( I have a huge black lab, so they’re applicable to me), and I already mentioned water (at least three days of water–one gallon per person or pet per day), and some spare cash since ATMs and point of sale might not work.

When my daughter was younger, my wife and I learned the hard way that we needed to keep more diapers as part of our kit since you never know when the power will be out, stores will be closed, and debris will block the roadway, limiting your options. And believe me, no one wants to be stuck with a baby that has no diapers! Since no parent wants to run short on diapers or baby formula, this would be a good time to make sure you’ve got enough set aside to last for at least a week. Fortunately, for us, the debris in this case was snow from last winter’s storm, but we learned our lesson. My wife also discovered the benefit of having an LED headlamp rather than a traditional flashlight, so you have both of your hands free.

Parents, get your kids involved and let them pick out some snacks and food for your emergency stash, since they’ll be the ones that have to eat it and you’ll be the one that has to hear them complain that they don’t want to eat what you picked! Now that our daughter is older, we have had to replace some of the baby food she ate with Dora the Explorer Spaghetti O’s and other canned food that she would be willing to eat if we can only cook with our camp stove or barbecue grill.

As for earthquake specific items, I would suggest face and dust masks for use during clean up and an emergency toilet (basically a 5-gallon bucket with a seat) and garbage bags to use as liners. The reality is that water and sewer lines can and will break–especially in areas that are subject to liquefaction. You’ll be much more comfortable with this arrangement than going outside–especially during the windy and rainy winters in the Pacific Northwest.

What do you think the Northwest should learn from other places, I suppose California and Japan in particular, about how to deal with earthquakes?

I think we have to shift the way in which we view both earthquake preparedness and recovery. Earthquake and tsunami safety shouldn’t be a standalone issue, but a component of everything we do in earthquake country. The Japan earthquake and tsunami was an important event for all of us. Japan spends significantly more than the U.S. on earthquake mitigation and their buildings, and infrastructure outside of the tsunami hazard zone fared remarkably well. However, when it came to the tsunami, they were planning for the most probable event, not the worst case possible event. This is why we saw water flowing over the top of their seawalls and penetrating their other defenses.

In Washington and throughout the Pacific Northwest we have not had the vast written history that a nation like Japan does, so our focus has been on looking at the geological record. What we find is that our subduction zone, Cascadia, has produced earthquakes and tsunamis regularly enough to know that it averages a M9+ earthquake every 500-600 years, but this is an average, which means that some earthquakes have occurred only a few hundred years apart and others much longer.

When the next one will happen is anyone’s best guess, so we need to be vigilant and ready. This means looking at the concept of resilience in terms of our systems, infrastructure, and buildings. The reality is that if we do not make seismic safety investments in these aspects of our communities during peacetime, people, property, the environment, and our economy will suffer the effects afterwards. The Washington State Seismic Safety Committee has been examining these issues and is working on a project entitled “The Resilient Washington State Initiative” to get a better snapshot of where we are today and what we can do to buy down tomorrow’s recovery at today’s rates.