Please let what's happening in New Orleans spur you to get your own emergency kit together!

Things you really need:

Canned and bagged food to last a week. And a can opener that doesn't need electricity or all cans need pop tops.

Water to last three weeks. You don't need to buy commercial bottled water. I save milk cartons, wash them, and fill them with tap water. I have 25 bottles lined up in the garage in time order, and recycle the oldest as I add a new one. Or you can empty them and re-fill on your birthday every year.

Cash to last a while. ATMs might not work for several days.

A crank or solar (or combination) cell phone charger.  

Never let your gas tank in your car get under 1/2 (thanks Dad for teaching me this!), and if you see a disaster headed your way (only hurricanes are so helpful in this way), fill up your tank as soon as the NHC tells you it's headed your way. Do not assume a Cat 1 hurricane will stay that low, not with rapid intensification the way it's been happening the past decade. 

Gas for anything else you have that requires it (chainsaw, generator).

A few big packages of hand wipes in case you need to bathe with them. Hurricanes and earthquakes can result in no water at all coming to you.

Paper plates and napkins. Even if you usually are more "green" than that, you get a pass during an emergency. In a flood situation when water isn't safe to wash dishes in, or an earthquake that leaves you without water, you'll be happy you have them. Paper is better than plastic if you have a safe place to burn it, in case trash pick up doesn't happen for a week. (I have a burn ring at my house.) 

Sufficient drugs for a month, prescription or over the counter. Masks for disease and dust reasons. And a decent first aid kit.

Photos you've taken of important documents (birth certificates, insurance, proof you rent or own your home, driver's license, etc) available on your phone and in the cloud.

If you have kids, books and cards and puzzles and other non-electrical entertainments.

Batteries for anything you have that requires them. I use rechargeables, and I always have eight AA and AAA batteries ready to go.

Things you might want:

If you only have an electric stove, a gas grill to cook with. If you don't have power after two days, you may be grilling a lot of food at once and having the neighbors over.

A bug-out bag. Mine, a hat, and sturdy boots are hanging right by my car in the garage. I can grab them and go, and they have plenty. Sturdy boots are crucial because so many disasters leave you with glass, nails, or other hazardous items to walk over. In California, they tell you to keep your boots and a hard hat or bike helmet right under your bed. Good advice! Pre-packed bug-out bags are useful if you need to go to a shelter.

A generator, but only if you understand how to use it safely. I have two relatives with whole-house generators, and I have one in my RV (which also serves as the biggest bug-out bag ever.)

A solar shower. I use Advanced Element's, and I used it twice a week for several years without it ever springing a leak. 

Small survival gadgets like a Swiss Army Knife or a multi-tool, a water filter, and a magnesium fire starter (mine has a compass on the end of it). I keep all these in my bug-out bag (which is a backpack), along with toilet paper, a small first aid kit, two bandanas, extra socks, a fleece vest, two "space blankets," plastic bags, a paperback book to read, and a tiny fishing kit in a film cannister).

I also own a rechargeable fan that last four hours on low. There are some that operate off a small solar panel. Think how people in New Orleans would love one of those this week. It's not A/C, spray yourself with water and stand in front of it, and it's better than nothing.

And please, when you hear the words "mandatory evacuation," evacuate!

Most nations and many states and provinces have websites on emergency preparation. In the US, it's ready.gov.

How natural are disasters?

Natural disasters often aren’t “natural” at all.

When a volcano erupts, when a big earthquake happens, when that earthquake causes a tsunami, a “natural disaster” has a natural cause, to be sure. (Usually. Fracking for natural gas now causes a lot of earthquakes in Oklahoma and Montana, but so far these are far too small to kill anyone.)

But in the cases of wildfires, floods, hurricanes, and electrical outages, often the “disaster” part is about not what nature has done, but about what we have done. It is a natural event made disastrous by human choices.

This is even true to an extent about earthquakes. Even a 9.0 earthquake would have a hard time killing people if we all lived in yurts or tipis. A few living such a life would die from rock falls, and on the coast many thousand might die from a tsunami were conditions right, but most people these days die in earthquakes from stuff—man-made stuff—falling on their heads. Roofs, facades, windows, paintings, lumber, facing stones, pediments, and bridges all come tumbling down when the earth shakes. In your own house, a heavy glass-fronted painting hanging on the wall could be the end of you in a quake.

If a hurricane hits an uninhabited island, there is no disaster. That’s just Mother Nature doing what she’s done for millions of years. Palm trees evolved to make it through hurricanes. And while hurricanes are certainly a force of nature, if we made better building decisions, wrote stricter zoning codes, and made evacuations mandatory on the mainland and built tough concrete shelters on islands, almost no one would die.

As the earth warms, as oceans warm, and as storms become bigger, incidents of extreme weather and wildfire grow bigger and more dangerous. This too was our choice—is our choice every time we drive a car or turn the air conditioning down or the heat up, with each child we have who goes on to have more children, all of them living the standard suburban life with its profligate energy use. This is our choice, not Mother Nature’s to drive worse weather disasters.

We make choices that can make weather and tectonic events worse...or better. All of those natural events are, whether we think of it often or not, necessary to life on Earth as we know it.

By law, in Miami, for instance, you must build better now to survive hurricanes. (But what do poor people living in sub-standard housing do? What do the poor of Puerto Rico do? Or the poor living in the flood plains of the world’s big rivers? I'll address this in more detail next week.)

Zoning regulations are also stricter in LA and San Francisco, which have some of the most stringent building codes in the US. (Japan’s are far better still--and there’s hardly a type of severe disaster Japan isn’t prone to.) Most of the buildings that lasted through the 1989 Loma Prieta Quake will last again through a similar-strength quake. And if buildings suffered cracks or survivable damage, the owners, if they were smart, did some retrofitting. I worked in an historical brick building in San Francisco, and the owners spent tens of thousands of dollars in the retrofit in the early 80’s, and the building came through the 1989 quake perfectly intact, though most brick buildings will crumble into a pile of bricks and mortar that has returned to sand in a big quake.

At a personal level, people can also get smarter. Once I experienced the quake, every house I lived in thereafter I did certain things to. I strapped the hot water heater to a support beam. I drove screws through the back of bookcases and knick-knack shelving and into studs in the wall. You pick up one disaster of a house in a quake, and you don’t do it again. You pay for a seismic inspection and do whatever the inspector tells you to do.

I know I'm being terribly judgmental here, but I do not understand when I see videos of Oklahoma post-tornado, and we’re looking at nice ranch homes, and the reporter says only one in 100 people have a basement or tornado shelter. People, you live in Oklahoma! Don’t you love your children? Apparently not, for there aren’t even laws about elementary schools in Oklahoma having tornado shelters or safe rooms. People standing in front of leveled homes will talk on TV about how they lost their new flatscreen TV and boat, which they apparently had the money to buy instead of a tornado shelter. That surely fits the definition of insanity. The absence of a legal requirement for schools to have shelters seems to me criminally irresponsible of zoning commissions and Oklahoma's state legislature, and I don't know about you, but I hate thinking of those children dying who do not have to. People, it’s only money. So, a better legislature passes a law mandating school shelters, and everyone in the district pays an extra $25 on their annual property tax bill for five years to build the school a shelter. Surely a human life, the life of an 8-year-old, even if you never meet that child, is worth that tiny amount to you. Isn't it? Apparently not, for it's still not happening there.

So before we blame Mother Nature for disasters, we should look in the mirror. Are you contributing to climate change more than an average person on the planet? Is your house in a risky area and you haven’t bothered to do everything you can afford to minimize your risks? Are you one of those fools who owns a working car but does not obey a mandatory evacuation order? (Do such people simply not understand the word “mandatory?”) And please tell me you’re not one of those fools who runs out to the dock to take a video of the storm surge coming in and the 12 foot waves breaking! If you want to live in wildfire area, you think hard before buying a place right up against the woods or dry grasses, asking yourself if the pretty view is worth the risk, and you consider concrete and tile construction before you fall in love with the beautiful hardwood and cedar shake ranch home. You keep the yard picked up and trees far away from the house, just as the fire marshal recommends. And if you're a developer, you do not fight sane zoning laws that keep safe distances between subdivisions that help prevent a wildfire jumping quickly from one neighborhood to the next.

Even if we do everything we can, some people will still die in natural disasters. A hurricane’s storm surge can be quick and powerful. A traffic jam in a n evacuation zone can be so terrible that people end up exposed to the disaster and die. You might already be disabled, and it’s impossible for you to get out in time. You might be poor and not be able to evacuate. Your state may have planned badly for evacuations and there's not enough gasoline for sale to get everyone out of the area. Bad luck happens.

But please, don’t make a natural event into a disaster it didn’t have to be. Live in as safe a place you can afford, and be as prepared as you can. (more information at https://www.ready.gov/make-a-plan)

I know I'll never convince TV to write copy about Mother Nature's "wrath" during disasters. She is not actually wrathful. She's doing what she is meant to do, what she did before people came along, and what she'll do after people are gone. The dramatic events like hurricanes and earthquakes are only disastrous to us when we've made choices that don't take their inevitability into account.

If your air conditioning fails in an emergency

If you live in a climate like mine, where the highs can crest 120 degrees in the shade, you live in fear of the electricity going out, and particularly of a massive power failure.

I’ve lived without heat in sub-freezing temps. It’s not only possible, it’s not that awful for a twelve-hour stretch. You just pile on the blankets, double up on socks, do everything you must with thin gloves on, drink hot liquid if you have a gas stove or way to heat it, and you can survive it. Your own body provides the heat you need, and the only trick is to trap it and not let it drift away from you.

But 120 degrees in the shade is 140+ in the sun, and if your house is in the sun (a pretty sure bet in the desert!), and the electricity fails, in twelve hours, you could be dead: Dead of heat stroke, dead of a stroke or heart attack, and miserable before you go to meet your maker.

If you remembered to put gas in your car (another reason to never let it fall under 50% full), perhaps you can drive out of the outage area and to a place you can find a cool building. Perhaps you have a generator and sufficient gasoline to run it for days and days--but I bet you don’t. Without electricity over a wide area, gas stations can't pump gas.

Sometimes a power outage stretches for hundreds of miles, and driving away from it is impossible. Or it happens when your car is in the shop, and you’re stuck at home in the heat.

So here’s something you can do to cool yourself down 10 to 20 degrees, which could be the difference between life and death. Keep block ice frozen all the time in warm weather if you have a big freezer--or keep water in plastic zipper bags frozen in a normal-size freezer, and put that ice in a cheap Styrofoam cooler, and run a fan past it. A DC fan can be run off a tiny solar panel hung out the window, and if you check at Amazon, you’ll see they have solar fans that are exact this--a panel, cable, and fan. So you get the fan going, you blow it over the ice, and you and your family stay in a smallish room and sit still, and you’ll be cooler than you were.

You can even pre-make a pretty nifty device like this:  Either use a solar fan with the remote panel you can hang out the window to keep it running, or buy a $150 rechargeable lithium battery that you can plug the fan into.

Don’t move around as you enjoy your homemade cooling system. Wear light clothing. Read a book, play a card game, or nap. Drink a lot of water. Bathe your face occasionally with a damp cloth. Stay cool until the sun goes down. And survive.

Habits that help you prepare for a disaster

Disasters might give you warning, as with hurricanes, but usually they do not. You're sitting there reading a book, and the power goes out. Or the earth starts to shake and your glass figurines fall off the shelf. Or the tornado siren comes. Or your phone buzzes, and it's your local emergency management office telling you there has been a train wreck and toxic chemicals are spilling into your neighborhood. Or you look up from pulling weeds in the vegetable garden, and the sky has gone dark and the sun is turning pink, and the hair on the back of your neck lets you know it's a wildfire blowing your way.

Of course you have your emergency supplies ready for "sheltering in place," don't you? And an emergency contact plan with your family, including someone out of town who will coordinate your locations and safety check-ins? You know that when cell towers get overloaded, texts will get through when calls won't, right?

You already own a generator if you're in a cold climate, or hurricane country, or dependent upon an electric breathing device to stay alive, and you won't be one of those people running out to buy one 10 minutes before a hurricane hits, will you? And you have your car filled up to at least half, because letting it go below half a tank is a bad thing. If you have a hybrid or electric, you top it up every night, right?

Your shelves have plenty of canned food, including soups, and you have bags of rice and beans and canned tomatoes to flavor them.  And you have a camp stove or gas stove or propane grill outside so you can cook them, right?

You're not short on kitty litter or pet food, I hope!

You know your neighbors, and who among them is elderly or disabled and might need your help, don't you? The single parents that might be away when the disaster strikes, leaving frightened children alone?

No? Then don't wait until it's too late. Make sure all that is in place by the end of next weekend. Get into good habits, and then you won't be caught off-guard when a disaster does happen.

Emergency Supplies

It's a good time to revisit the concept of having an emergency supply kit that you can grab and take with you if you are evacuated because of flood, fire, hurricane, or toxic waste spill. You might build a three-day or a five-day kit. Some of what you might want to include:

• Water - one gallon of water per person per day for at least three days, for drinking and sanitation
• Food - at least a three-day supply of non-perishable food
• Battery-powered or hand crank radio and a NOAA Weather Radio with tone alert
• Flashlight
• First aid kit
• Extra batteries
• Whistle to signal for help
• Dust mask to help filter contaminated air and plastic sheeting and duct tape to shelter-in-place
• Moist towelettes, garbage bags and plastic ties for personal sanitation
• Cell phone with chargers and a backup battery
• Prescription medications
• Non-prescription medications such as pain relievers, anti-diarrhea medication, antacids or laxatives
• Spare glasses 
• Infant formula, bottles, diapers, wipes, diaper rash cream
• Pet food and extra water for your pet, plus their crate and leash
• Cash or traveler's checks (ATMs don't work in power outages)
• Important family documents such as copies of insurance policies, identification and bank account records saved electronically or in a waterproof, portable container
• Sleeping bag or warm blanket for each person
• Complete change of clothing appropriate for your climate and sturdy shoes
• Household chlorine bleach and medicine dropper to disinfect waterMatches in a waterproof container
• Feminine supplies and personal hygiene items
• Mess kits, paper cups, plates, paper towels and plastic utensils
• Paper and pencil
• Books, games, puzzles or other activities for children
• Duct tape, which is often useful
• A tarp for picnics or makeshift tent

Think through where you might end up: at a shelter, a friend's house, or stuck camping out of your car. 

Do this before you think you might need to. Dedicate a corner of your garage to it. If you have no garage, pick the closet closest to your front door and make sure everything is packed neatly into cheap duffle bags so the family can throw everything in the car within 15 minutes if they need to. Change the water and medications every year (your birthday is a good time to do that) and recharge the spare phone battery.

I also put a water filter in my supplies and parachute cord. Think through your locale, your situation, and add whatever you want.

And NEVER let your gas tank go under 50% full. Because you really never know.

Electricity: we have some problems

I want to talk today about electricity.

It isn’t a big part of my Oil Apocalypse novel series yet. But it will be in book #4.

In the U.S. and Canada, we’re close to being in big trouble with electricity. We’ve relied on it our entire lives. It has always been there with the flick of a switch, as much of it as we want, whenever we want it. Less and less is that likely to be so in the future.

Right now, fossil fuels produce most of the U.S. electricity, with nuclear and renewables of all sorts producing about 20% each. Fossil fuels will run out. Also, they are horrible for our health in the short and long term, burning them drives climate change, and yet we’re stuck with them for now.

Our entire electrical infrastructure is based on them, and nukes work pretty well with that system. As we move to renewables, this old system becomes a problem. The short explanation is this: electricity is quite hard to store. Nuclear power and fossil fuel power cannot be ramped up or shut off quickly. Those plants were designed to run all the time. Wind and solar (which by the way are not as eco-friendly as we might hope) can--and do--start up and shut off in seconds. The problem is with the shutting off.  The wind quits blowing. Clouds roll in. No electricity! But if the coal plants are all shut off when that happens, or the nuclear plant is at rest, you can’t exactly turn them on like a light switch. It can take hours or days to make those plants start generating electricity again.

So imagine a future in which we rely 100% on renewable electricity. The wind quits blowing and the sun goes down, both at the same time. Oops.

Choice A: live without electricity until the wind blows again or the sun shines again, or until another form can be generated or transported across a long distance. (As someone who lives in a hot desert right now, I can promise you, this is not really an option on 120-degree days!) Or choice B: find a way to store it in massive amounts so there is electricity saved up for times when sun or wind or water isn’t generating it.

Storage of electricity is a big challenge. Batteries go bad. Big batteries--enough to run a whole city during the peak evening hours--aren’t part of our infrastructure. There are other ways to store electricity, like using excess when you have it to pump a whole lot of water up really high, and then letting the water fall in a controlled manner, via gravity, to spin turbines when you need it, but is there such a device in your neighborhood? I’m guessing not. So we need to build these sorts of storage devices. Or invent new ways to store it. We’re not nearly there yet. Indeed, we’ve barely begun.

Worse, if you are on wind, and the wind starts to blow hard, there can be too much electricity and that can burn out transformers, fry lines, and otherwise result in damage to the grid so there is no electricity at all. Right now, you could ask a wind farm to shut off their delivery to the grid at such times, but they won’t. Why? Because that’s how they get paid, by delivering electricity. As we switch to more renewables but don’t update the delivery system--the wires and so on--expect more outages from this sort of event.

You like solar better? Here’s a chart I whipped up that compares electricity generated to electricity used by a typical family on a weekday. You can see the problem at a glance. You need some way to store it (my characters use batteries, as I have myself in the past) if you want to do anything after sunset that requires power.

There’s a lifestyle solution to this, which I lived for many, many years. You do a lot of electrical things from 10-2, when the sun is highest, including charging your computer, portable DVD player, phone, and Kindle. You run your fan all you want during those hours. You use your vacuum cleaner. But then at 2:00, you start to live a different lifestyle. You conserve. When the sun falls, you use up all the charge in one device, then in the next, then in the next to entertain yourself, and if you run them all down, you don’t get to used them again until 10 a.m. the next day. You rise with the sun and sleep soon after dark. Prime-time TV is the enemy of this lifestyle. You turn on only one low-voltage LED light. This works pretty well in spring and fall and in summers in temperate locations. Forget about heating in winter if it’s cold because in the dead of night, that's when you’re down to very little stored electricity indeed. You pile on another blanket and slip on another pair of socks. You use a hot water bottle to be warm enough to get to sleep. And, like me, you eat a baked potato for breakfast every morning because the oven working for 45 minutes helps take the chill off the kitchen.

I think I’m a rare person who is willing to live like this forever, having first experienced unlimited electricity at my command. And even I’m only willing to live like that forever if I can inhabit a temperate place! Unfortunately, not everyone in the USA can fit into coastal California, where you could live like that indefinitely. (In my case, I moved twice a year, using elevation control as my substitute for heat/air conditioning. Up high in the mountains in summer, it was pleasant in the days. Down in the low desert in winters, it was warm enough at night to need no heat. And by warm enough, I mean it was around freezing on the worst nights. Again, not a choice many people would embrace. But you do get used to that.)

Back to problems with the grid. Because of deregulation in the late 80’s, trees don’t get trimmed as often today, and trees growing into lines can bring the electrical grid down for millions of people. So can ice storms. So can a computer glitch or an inattentive employee at the power company. We live right now with a cobbled-together system that is aging, that isn't meant for renewable generation, and is really something of a mess.

Collectively, we are in deep trouble. Right now, right here, in the world we inhabit, our electricity delivery system is like that old car you kept running despite the hole in the floorboard and the non-functioning heater when you were 22 and poor. It’s a wonder it got you anywhere at all.

As for my characters in my novel series Oil Apocalypse? They were smart. They didn’t trust the aging grid, so they stayed off it when they built their homes. They generated their own electricity. One family had both solar and wind, so if the sun wasn’t shining, the wind might still be blowing. Thus, they could afford to have a smaller battery bank. The other families with only one form of power generation had lots of batteries.

And, spoiler alert, here comes a new problem. Batteries, unfortunately, don’t last forever. At some point after batteries are no longer manufactured in my fictional world, and the batteries hold very little charge, these off-the-grid systems will only be useful during sunny days (for the solar powered home) or windy moments (for the wind powered home). Extremes of weather will have to be dealt with the way people always have and still do in poor countries: Bundle up when it’s cold, and don’t work hard and live in the shade when it’s hot.

If you thought this is going to be a problem in the future, you would probably own some labor-saving devices that weren’t electrical. I can barely remember helping my grandmother run a hand-crank wringer-washer. This is far easier than banging your clothes on a rock, and all it requires is human power, the turning of a simple crank several times. Even at age 5, I could turn the crank.

you needn't dress like this to use it

One power-saving device I loved in my solar-only lifestyle was this, a solar shower. Basically, a black plastic bag (I’ve tried several brands, and this is definitely the good one), it allows you to take a shower or to do your dishes with a minimal wait period and passive solar heating of the water. Passive-solar water heaters are another useful item for the post-apocalyptic survivor to own, and I’ve given both of these to my characters in Oil Apocalypse.

The toughest challenge with electricity and for living a lifestyle with little or none is food preservation. That’s going to be a serious problem for my characters in book 4. And if you’ve ever lost electricity for five days because of a storm, you know that, right? It was a problem for you as well. I’ve owned two-way refrigerators that can run on either propane or electricity. But if you don’t have electricity and you don’t have fossil fuels, that isn’t much of a help. So what do you do? Eat meat as soon as you kill it, or smoke it, or salt it. I hope you know of a good salt source nearby.

I’ve rambled, I see, and don’t have the time to un-ramble this blog post. (I’m finishing Oil Apocalypse #3 as I write this.) But I hope I’ve given you more to be afraid of think about.

For more on this topic, I suggest reading The Grid by Gretchen Bakke.

The lure of apocalyptic thinking

The truth is, after all that reading (see prior week's post) about how civilizations collapse (or contract and re-form in another way), I don’t really believe entirely in a quick apocalyptic crash like those I write about. Yes, I feel the draw of that sort of thinking. Who doesn’t? Most of us love exploring this idea, at least in the novels we read and the movies we watch. Some people take it even further and actually prepare for “the end times,” stockpiling food, ammunition, drugs, and gold.

really silly stuff

We are not as logical as we’d like to believe we are. We are not logical in the face of powerful animal emotions and drives that steer us more often than our complex thinking brains do.
Every generation--or quite large chunks of it--has thought it will be the last generation, that civilization is on the brink. That seems to be part and parcel of being a human being. It’s a form of egotism, say the experts, the unconscious belief that we are at the center of everything, that this, our lifetime, is the pivotal moment, that the world has never been going to hell in a handbasket faster and that the end is surely nigh.

And yet, what statistics show us is that the world has never been safer, not in the places most of my readers live. Safer how? From disease, from war, from roaming bands pillaging and raping. Over my lifetime the murder rate in my nation has dropped a lot.

The experts say, the psychology is: if the world is ending in my lifetime, then I’m pretty darned special, aren’t I? But if the world is safer now, if I’m just one of billions of people in a world that will continue without a hiccup when I die of some ignoble old-age disease, the same as tens of billions who came before me and billions more who will come after...then who am I? Sort of nobody. This kind of knowledge can set off an existential crisis.

This meshes with my experience and the cynical, skeptical view I've gained. I’ve lived through Y2K (the computers will all be so confused we won’t be able to eat, eeek! It’s the END), 2012, and Hale-Bopp hysteria and much more. I’m even old enough to have done the “duck and cover” drills for nuclear war (which, to be fair, seems remotely possible--I’ll allow you nuclear war as a semi-rational fear). When I was a kid and went somewhere like summer camp or a weekend rock music festival, and I met kids from other places, I realized everyone thought their own small town, no matter how truly inconsequential, would be high on the Russian’s list of targets for nuclear strikes. Sorry, people from (for example) Bloomington Indiana or Marion Illinois, but you were never ever on that list.

Even as a teenager, I saw that believing you were on that list elevated your sense of your own importance. If we were all right about being in the top 10 targets list in our goofy little Midwestern towns, then the Russians wouldn’t have had any bombs left for Washington DC or New York or bomber factories or missile silos. Surely they weren’t that stupid!

Most people who were rabid about Y2K or 2012 now would deny ever believing in it...much the way if you once got drunk at a wedding and made a fool of yourself, you push that out of your mind and might eventually come to deny that. (Perhaps we all need a wife to remind us of these moments. “Oh yes you did say that!” lol)

When we talk about the “collapse” of civilizations, or when scientists do, I often think we should use a different world. Collapse implies catastrophe. But when civilizations fall, they generally do something closer to “contract” (in drought-stricken deserts, as with the Anasazi, the people simply move, to literally greener pastures). Imperial Rome fell. It collapsed! We all know that. But, hey, you know, Rome is still there. You can go visit it, even! It’s in a place called Italy, and some of the people who live there are direct descendants of imperial Romans of 2000 years ago and even some of their buildings are still there. When Italy collapses as a nation--and it will, as all nations will--there will probably still be a Rome. It’s a good site to build a city, so it’ll probably still be a town after oil is long gone or after a pandemic hits or after climate change makes where I live uninhabitable.

If you’re interested in the psychology of end-time thinking, this article is interesting (written just after the world did not end in 2012): apocalypse psychology. A trip to google would get you a number more.

I’m not saying everything is hunky-dory and always will be. Read the last two month’s blog posts, and you’ll see how pessimistic I am. Oil will end. Potable water is going to be a real issue one day. The salinization of California's soil is likely going to create a worldwide food crisis before too long. Our electrical infrastructure (which I’ll write about in a future post) in the US and Canada is in bad shape and bizarrely enough, renewable energy sources are stressing it more than ever. So expect blackouts to increase until we get that sorted. And if you’re in a city, expect some rioting and looting during blackouts. Don’t go sightseeing when that happens because looters can be dangerous. Hunker down, conserve resources, don’t suffocate yourself with generator exhaust, and it will pass, the lights and fridge will come back on, the cleaning crews will be out sweeping up the broken glass, and all will be well again.

Even a big collapse, as with climate change or oil depletion, will not happen overnight. Adjustments will be made. People will move from Florida or Arizona, new technologies will ease the slide, and much of life in first world nations will be enjoyable as ever.

Longtime followers of my blog also know I say if you live in Oklahoma, be prepared for a tornado, in Toronto, for a bad ice storm, and in Florida, for a hurricane, in Japan...well, everything but tornadoes. You guys get the disasters in Japan! Those could happen, and while it is statistically unlikely you'd die from a weather event, you could be very uncomfortable for weeks because of it. Lightning is the biggest weather killer, and I'll bet that you have gone outside in a thunderstorm or gotten in the tub or shower. I know I have!

This post is my way of saying, though I am writing a novel series about a catastrophic end of oil scenario, I hope that you know it’s just fiction. Don’t let it push you over the edge into extremist thinking or behavior or for heaven's sake, make yourself sick over it. Look around you. Go for a walk in your own town. See? Everything is fine right now.

If you are worried for your children or grandchildren (even if they are not yet born), and what might happen to them thirty or fifty years down the road, I will talk about a couple of simple solutions to position them best for a contraction of civilization. I might be wrong in my suggestions, but they are largely fun suggestions, so you'll have lost nothing by trying one or two of them.

September is Preparedness Month

Here in the US, September is the month we're supposed to review our emergency plans, restock our food and water supply, and get ready for the coming year of natural disaster and power outages that might come our way.

I’m not much of a prepper. I do have a bug-out bag in my car trunk, and I do have 25 pounds of rice in my cupboard. But the latter came from my friend Ron and the former comes from my being a proponent of being prepared for realistic emergencies.

Not just preppers but everyone needs to be prepared for the sort of disaster that is most likely to happen wherever they live. Don’t worry about the end of the world; worry about the end of your stable world! Earthquakes, wildfires, tornados, hurricanes, sub-zero temperatures with electricity loss, house fires, floods: these are the likely events that could make your life uncomfortable or hellish at some point in the future.

For any emergency, you should have a three-day supply of water, food (and pet food) for every member of your family, cash, life-saving medications, and a change of clothes. Duct tape and a couple of bandanas are good additions, too, with many possible uses. A spare leash for each pet. Even six-year-old kids can have the special emergency backpack in their closet with a favorite old toy stuffed inside, ready to go at a moment’s notice if need be. A small first aid kit, which I hope you won’t need, is a good addition to one of the adult’s backpacks.

Take photos of your insurance papers, birth certificates, family phone numbers (since cell phones store those for us, we don’t remember these any more, do we?) and other crucial papers; upload them to the cloud, in an account you won’t forget the password of when you’re panicked. Make sure there are pictures of the pets in there, too, in case you get separated in a dire emergency and need to make lost pet posters. Even if your phone runs out of charge, usually in serious emergencies, you can find somewhere to get online. (libraries, special Red Cross facilities, cafes.)

The US government has done a terrific job of putting up emergency preparation information. (And anyone can look at it, no matter your nationality.) Ready.gov September is a month we’re to think of this, and if you haven’t freshened the water and food in your supplies you collected last time I nagged you about this, it’s a good month to do that. (Scroll down and click "emergencypreparedness" among my blog topics for all my posts on this.)

Stay safe.

Research on emerging epidemic diseases

I am writing a novel about a pandemic, and the research for it has been fascinating and terrifying.

As people continue to overpopulate the Earth, we come into contact with animals who have been harboring diseases for possibly thousands of years, but those diseases might do the hosts no or little harm. But when we catch these diseases, they can kill us. (In a few cases, like cholera, what we see as a pathogen had a beneficial effect to its host.) People are afraid of bioterrorism...but the truth is, we don't need to be afraid of a "them" giving us diseases, for we are doing pretty darned well at doing that to ourselves.

For instance, with Machupo, a South American hemorrhagic fever, it was cutting down forests to plant monoculture farms (monoculture, the planting of a single crop, exacerbates this problem everywhere) to sell in town, when the traditional ways they made a living were taken from them. This put people in contact with mice who carried the disease and who found their way into villages they'd never before visited. The act of the morning sweeping of the home, which sends pulverized mouse droppings into the air, can infect people.With some diseases, when that infected person goes to town, he passes it on to a dozen other people, and eventually an infected person will get on an airplane, and the disease can move around the globe in a day.

It's happening in the U.S. and Australia too, so we can't think it's some sort of thing that only occurs in South America or Africa. Our own overpopulation is putting us close to animals that carry "new" diseases. (New to us, at least.) As we drive more delicate birds to extinction, opportunist birds like crows, robins, pigeons (here in North America) take over, and their droppings or saliva get on our things. We might wash our car or mow our yard and get the disease. Or a mosquito might bite a crow and bite us, and now we're ill. West Nile Virus is such a disease, carried in some crows.

You hear people sneering and saying, "Why should I care about the extinction of some damned owl?" So here's another reason to care. Because we're finding out more and more that some of these endangered animals controlled a pest, or kept an infected species in balance. So for those who can only think selfishly, that's why you'd care. Because you don't want to die by drowning in your own fluids, or crapping yourself to the point of dehydrating yourself to death, or by bleeding out of your eyeballs, which could well be the eventual punishment for such a cavalier attitude about the balance of nature.

Why should you care about saving the wetlands? Same reason. It provides a home for species that might be controlling a disease we don't even yet know is out there. When you're watching a grandchild die of one of those diseases, and you learn this is the case, might you not feel ashamed of your sneering about "save the wetlands" campaigns? (Probably not, I fear. People who do a lot of sneering at good works tend to never look in the mirror and admit wrongdoing and responsibility for their own tragedies.)

Mother Nature is full of dangers, but that's no reason to hate Nature and try to wreck eons-long balances she has developed. To save ourselves, and our children, we need to tread more carefully. We need to begin by practicing zero population growth, personally. For those who can afford to eat organic, local food grown at farms that produce several crops, that ameliorates the problem, too. Factory and feedlot meats, with the antibiotic overuse, contribute to antibiotic resistance to bacterial disease, so if you can afford antibiotic-free meat, buy that.

And when the day comes--and I guarantee you it will--that a killer pandemic is sweeping across the land, and the CDC (or the equivalent in your nation) says, "Stay home. Wear a mask. Wash your hands," do that, and without whining.

And think long and hard before you get on an airplane. If it's for a vacation, I'll bet you there are pleasant places to visit within driving distance, where the only diseases you are breathing in are the ones your family might already have.

My bug-out bag

A bug-out bag, if you didn’t know, is “a portable kit that normally contains the items one would require to survive for seventy-two hours, when evacuating from a disaster.” (Wikipedia)

I keep my bug-out bag in the trunk of my car at all times. It takes up about a third of the space. Even though I live in one of the lowest-risk areas in the US for natural disasters, there’s an outside chance of a nuclear disaster upwind. It’s better to be prepared than not. Also, I can easily decide on the spur of the moment to go camping and not have to run home to gear up. There are things in the list I didn't fit in the photo:

Sleeping bag (a cheap one from my childhood, but it still works for most weather)
Pillow
Outerwear
Hiking boots
Bike helmet--nearly as good as a safety helmet for earthquakes
Backpack containing all the rest
Mylar blankets--two, with one for use as ground cover
First aid supplies, including a few aspirin, Benadryl, and Imodium I replace twice a year
Food
Water (more than shown!)
Water filtration device
Metal cup with handle (can serve as one-person saucepan)
Swiss Army Knife
Paracord (more than shown)
Magnesium fire-starter with whistle
Candles and matches
Duct tape
Survival fishing kit in film can: lead weights, hooks, safety pin, and coiled monofilament
Pad and pencil. Emergency phone numbers and addresses are written on the inside cover
Bandannas. (My readers will know my characters always have them! So do I.)
Brightly colored plastic bags--for trash and to help rescuers see me more easily.
Entertainments. When the SHTF, or any other time, I'm always up for a poker game

The items in bold/italic, I recommend. You can purchase them at Amazon, and I’ve included those links here.

As you can see, I didn’t run out and spend thousands of dollars on this gear. Some is old, some people gave me when I mentioned I was putting this together. The water filtration device, using technology developed in the Haiti earthquake, is new.

Great Shakeout: earthquake drill

15 October, 10:15 in the morning, your local time is the time to practice for an earthquake.

Your instructions are simple: Drop. Cover. Hold On.

Your kids will love it. (Grandma may have to be coaxed down and helped up.)

From the Great Shakeout website, but edited to my taste:

1. Drop, Cover, and Hold On: Drop to the ground, take Cover under a table or desk, and Hold On to it as if a major earthquake were happening (stay down for at least 60 seconds). Practice now so you will immediately protect yourself during earthquakes!


2. While still under the table, or wherever you are, look around and imagine what would happen in a major earthquake. What would fall on you or others?



3. A great extra step is to practice how to communicate with family, friends, and co-workers. Texts go through more quickly and do not overload the system, which is being used by people with dire medical emergencies and by first responders.

Preparedness Month: Outages

This week's focus in Preparation month is power outages, which I've pointed out before in this blog is a common disaster and potentially deadly. It is likely to become more common, so we all need to prepare for it.

From the US government's preparathon website, here are some tips:

• Fill plastic containers with water and place them in the refrigerator and freezer if there's room. Leave about an inch of space inside each one, because water expands as it freezes. These blocks of cold will help keep food cold longer during a temporary power outage.
• Most medication that requires refrigeration can be kept in a closed refrigerator for several hours without a problem.
• Because gas stations rely on electricity to power their pumps, keep your car tank at least half full at all times. (This is a good emergency preparation practice for all emergencies.)
• Know where the manual release lever of your electric garage door opener is located and how to operate it.

I'm sure you already know not to open the refrigerator or freezer doors unnecessarily during a power outage. Make a plan of what you'll need from the fridge, keep a list, and only open it two or three times a day, keeping the door half-open, for as briefly as possible. A two person food brigade can help the unloading go more quickly and get that door shut again.

Have plenty of canned food on hand, as a matter of course. If you don't have room in your kitchen, a box of canned food can be tucked into the back of closet or kept in a garage. Every year or two, rotate those cans into your pantry or donate them to a food drive, and re-fill the emergency supply with new cans.

Somewhere in your emergency supplies, you should have a hundred dollars in cash tucked away. When the electricity goes down, grocery stores may stay open, but they won't be accepting checks or credit cards. ATMs won't be working, either. So you'll need cash.

Stay safe. Stay prepared.

Preparedness Month: for children

Most kids will become enthusiastic about the topic of emergency preparedness, and involving them in your plans will help the whole family stay safe, and it will give you a chance to educate your children about natural disasters, weather, and geology.

The ready.gov kids' site here has good information, presented attractively. It tells us to:

• Make a plan
• Build a kit
• Know the facts
• Get involved 

The site also has a comic-book adventure through several disasters that tests knowledge and was fun for me to play. I even learned something new: that in a wildfire, you should leave your home lights on to help firefighters see the building through thick smoke.

Building an emergency kit can be a fun activity for the whole family. Here's a link to one pdf checklist for suggested supplies. So involve your children and be prepared for the worst...as a family.

Preparedness Month: 30 Days, 30 Ways

There's a pretty cool preparation game with blog and Facebook page to help people prepare for natural disaster emergencies: 30 Days 30 Ways. Every day, there is a paragraph or two to read and a task to complete. Some tasks are about raising awareness and self-educating, and some are practical about building your emergency kit. I can imagine turning this into a great scouting activity, too.  Again, while this is a site associated with the US government's Preparedness Month, anyone in any nation can take part. Enjoy!

(And to reassure my fans, #amwriting on Gray III, and my stand-alone tornado novel will be revised and published soon after that.)

Preparedness Month: Floods

In the US, it's National Preparedness month, but my Australian, Canadian, and UK readers, and all, are invited to join us!

Mark Arvette, via Wikimedia Commons

Week 1's focus is floods. I am familiar with these both from growing up along a big river (where I volunteer sandbagged more than once) and from living now in a desert where washes fill very quickly with monsoon-season rainwater. Six inches of moving water can knock down an average-sized person, and children are more vulnerable. Two feet of water can sweep away a car.

Don't risk drowning. Stay out of moving water and wait patiently for it to subside--or turn around and find another route.

While camping next to a stream in a mountain environment might look inviting, during the rainy season or when there are rain clouds in the vicinity, walk up hill to higher ground and camp there.

If you are evacuated from your home for a major flood, please, heed the evacuation order and don't return until the official all-clear has come.

Be safe. Be prepared.

Prepared vs. Prepper

When I talk to people these days about the importance of being prepared for a disaster, they sometimes edge away and say "I'm not one of those extremist prepper people!"

You don't have to be. Personally, I think if there's an entire collapse of civilization, I'm doomed anyway, and I'm not sure I'd want to be the last one standing after a nuclear holocaust or asteroid hit. Furthermore, the likelihood of those is remote, so I don't worry about them. (If you do worry, and go the whole prepper route, and can afford to spend the time and money on it, good on you.)

What I would like you to think about, though, are the disasters that actually do kill people and are likely in your area. You needn't prepare for The End of The World. But do prepare to avoid the possible end of your world.

Red Cross Emergency Kit. Image FEMA

Number one on your list of preparations to make should be not for a natural disaster but the common house fire. 2,650 deaths per year in the US are due to these, and you'll see proportional numbers in other countries. Make sure your smoke detectors are working, check the expiration date on any fire extinguishers you own, and run a fire drill for your family once a year. Choose an annual date: your birthday is good, or use ShakeOut Day (October 15), a good day to think about disasters beyond earthquakes, too. Have your plan in place, and practice. The more that people practice what to do in such a situation, the more likely they will survive.

If you take care of no other preparations, please, take care of that.

Anyone can lose electricity due to weather extremes or brown-out. I'd rank this area of preparation next, particularly if you live somewhere it gets well below freezing or above 90F/30C. If you have insulin in the refrigerator, you need to think through what you'll do with it if the power is out for a week. If your continued existence depends on a breathing device that runs off electricity, you need a plan for producing electricity. While it's true that homo sapiens existed for hundreds of thousands of years without electricity, and most of us could probably survive a week without if we had some canned food and crackers, being prepared for the loss of power is a good idea.

Still with me and have more energy for preparing? Next on your list should be preparing for the one most common natural disaster in your area. If you live in northern Minnesota or most of Canada, that's going to be cold weather and blizzards, and I bet if you do live there, you're prepared for it, with extra clothes in your car, road flares, chains, and possibly a generator at home. If you live in Oklahoma or northern Texas or Kansas, you're going to know what to do in the case of a tornado. Coastal Californians think often about earthquakes. (And people in Memphis and St. Louis and Seattle need to think about them more--they're rare but can be terrible there when they do arrive.) The Gulf Coast is prepared for hurricanes. Hawai'ians know the tsunami evacuation routes. My readers in Australia know a good deal about wildfires.

I happen to live in a place with almost no chance of any natural disaster, but there are nuclear plants upwind, so I'm prepared for that sort of disaster. I have a bug-out kit in my car trunk, and I never let the petrol get below a half a tank in my car. In most disasters, sheltering in place is the smartest option, but with hurricanes/typhoons and nuclear plant disasters, evacuating is the preferred response. Preparing for it took me a few hours of buying and packing supplies over a week's time, but it only takes me a few minutes a year to make sure they're all still in place. I could be on the road in less than five minutes.

To summarize, please prepare for these: 1) Home fire. 2) Loss of electricity. 3) The number 1 likely natural disaster for your region. It's not extremist to do so--it's smart.

Earthquake safety revisited

Watching the amateur and CCTV footage from the Nepal earthquake, I thought it was a good idea to revisit some safety concepts:

NZ, Wikimedia Commons

If you live or travel in an earthquake-prone area, don't be in a brick building if you can possibly help it. California legislates against building with brick, and its historical brick buildings are retrofitted, but in places like Memphis and St. Louis and Seattle, which could experience a terrible earthquake, there are unreinforced brick buildings that will kill thousands in a bad quake.

If an earthquake hits, the correct behavior is: STOP. DROP. COVER. HOLD ON. This will give you the best chance of surviving without injury.

Immediately drop and crawl under the heaviest piece of furniture you are near, hang on with one hand, and keep your head protected with the other arm. Again and again, in videos of every earthquake, I see people running toward glass doors and walls. That's the very stupidest thing you could do and results in many serious cuts. One of these days, you'll see someone beheaded that way on film--please don't be that person. In Nepal, people were running for doors in such a panic, there were surely more injuries from the crush there than there would have been had they dropped under a table, or even just stayed where they were. Outside, windows, bricks, and gargoyles from buildings can rain down on you, so in a city, outside is less safe than inside.

Even in a brick home, unless you're right at the door, you likely won't have time to get out. If you grab your kid or your purse and head out, by the time you're on the lawn, the shaking will likely have stopped. It's still better to crawl under the desk or dining room table and wait out the seconds of the quake.

This is worth practicing with your family or office, too. Set aside a time for a drill, or use the worldwide Shakeout  (http://www.shakeout.org/) on October 15. Drop, cover, and hold on. If you're practiced, you'll be less likely to panic.

I like my readers! Please, all of you, stay safe.

Retrofitting to the tune of $15,000,000,000

I am a great advocate of individuals preparing for realistic and likely natural disasters. Here, I make suggestions on emergency supplies you might gather. (In the US, check ready.gov for more.) I also have lived in California, where the state and local governments have done a good job of passing zoning laws that protect its citizens. Every time there's a big earthquake, they learn the new lessons and retrofit public projects.

In comparison, the Mississippi River Valley towns that might experience a repeat of the terrible New Madrid quakes (as occur in my novel Quake) are doing a not very good job with zoning laws or retrofits. It's understandable (if not excusable). Human memory fades, and no one is left alive who can describe the terror of that last series of big earthquakes. The lakes that appeared out of nowhere were a shock and wonder to people in 1812; they're the old, reliable fishing spots 200 years later. The brick house that was built 40 years ago is in pretty nice shape, and brick doesn't even need to be painted. (It also falls on your head and probably kills you in a quake, unless you get a pricey retrofit.) You'd think the 4.0 earthquake that comes every ten or twenty years would be a good reminder that it's time to act, but people are good at ignoring warning signs, and politicians are too often short-term thinkers.

Even in earthquake-conscious California, you're going to run into some problems when trying to prepare for the "Big One" that is coming to the LA and to the San Francisco Bay Area. This week we learned that to retrofit the LA water system so that, in the case of a 7.8 quake, most people could still flush the toilet and get water from the tap (which may still need to be boiled before drinking), would cost 12-15 billion (that's US billion) dollars. That's $15,000,000,000 US. Not cheap. For a third of that price, San Francisco is retrofitting its water system, and the expected result is that residents' water bills will triple. (This is not taking into account the current record-breaking drought in California, which will likely drive water bills up more as water has to be transported from hundreds of kilometers away.)

All infrastructure improvements of this type start with an estimate of likelihood of earthquakes over the next 30 years. Here is a rough map of California's earthquake probabilities, for a quake of over 6.7 magnitude. Of course, one day, an earthquake will come along that is so powerful, preparations for a 7.5 or 8.0 earthquake will do little good anyway, but preparing for once-every-millennium earthquakes would be prohibitively expensive. City planners have to play the odds. 

And, let's be honest, human nature being what it is, they are damned if they do and damned if they don't prepare for the earthquake that is likely to hit LA within the next 50 years. People will scream about a tripled water bill, and people will scream more loudly when there's no water at the hospital where they've taken their severely injured child who might die as a result of the inadequate infrastructure. And they'll never admit their own parsimony over the water bill caused their child's death. People are funny that way.

I know what it is to be on a tight budget. I understand no one wants his or her bills to increase. But is it better to save a few dollars per month now, or to save your life in 5 or 10 or 20 years, when the Big One hits? I'm glad I'm not the LA politicians trying to convince citizens that this is in their best long-term interest.

Source for LA water system story: LA Times 24.3.2015

Video on earthquake energy release

This is the US Pacific Tsuami Warning Center's graphical representation of the energy released by various earthquakes of recent memory, ending with that of two really big ones from the early 1960's. The numbers are the quakes' moment magnitude. Let me quote their explanation of what this means:

"Moment magnitude numbers scale such that that energy release increases by a factor of about 32 for each whole magnitude number. For example, magnitude 6 releases about 32 times as much energy as magnitude 5, magnitude 7 about 32 times as much as magnitude 6, and so on.

"This animation graphically compares the relative "sizes" of some 20th and 21st century earthquakes by their moment magnitudes (according to USGS/NEIC). Each circle's area represents its relative energy release, its color indicates its tsunami potential, and its label lists its moment magnitude, its location, and the year it happened."


 

Note, too, that the human cost may not seem proportional to the energy released...until you take into consideration population density near the epicenter/focus of the quake, local building methods, and earthquake preparedness.Japan's earthquake/tsunami preparedness is the best in the world, and you can be sure that were it not, the death toll of about 16,000 in 2011 would have been much higher.

Happy (?) Anniversary, SF Quake

25 years ago today was the Loma Prieta earthquake--the one that happened just before a  game of the World Series that pitted two SF Bay Area baseball teams against one another. A lot of the US learned of the quake from being tuned in to the pre-game show. Al Michaels: "I'll tell you what, we're having an earth--" and the transmission stopped. A friend of mine, watching that, reported that his friend said, "What? What's an 'earth?'" And my friend, a former Californian, couldn't help but laugh; he knew.

I was in a car in the East Bay and did not feel it. You had to be darned close to the epicenter to feel it in a moving car. Santa Cruz county residents later told me stories of pulling over to check their "flat tire," and then noticing everyone else seemed to have a flat tire, too--by that time the shaking was over but, being Californians, they figured it out pretty quickly. I felt nothing until the car hit a chunk of collapsed roadway a half-hour later and my teeth clacked together as the car bottomed out. (That section of road was closed an hour later and stayed closed for months.) I began to get suspicious about the lack of lights--either fog had really socked in the area ahead of me, or something was wrong. The car radio told me what.

The Bay Bridge was broken, so getting to my flat in the city required a strange route home, but I got there before three hours had passed. Everything on the north and south walls had fallen down, and kitchen drawers on those walls had shaken themselves open. The pets weren't sure they were ever coming out from under the bed, thank you very much, but once I knew they were alive, I felt calmed. (Food soon convinced them it was a good idea to rejoin society.) Cleaning up would have to wait for lights, power, and the next day.

One of the worst thoughts in a ~7.0 quake is "maybe that was just the foreshock." It's not a happy thought as tiny tremors keep rattling your home--and I have to say, that was the worst bit of trauma I experienced, and it really doesn't qualify as trauma...just edginess that faded over the months.

If you were alive and watched TV news about the event, you'd have thought that the city burned for days. A part of one block burned for a couple hours, and yet the same image was replayed steadily to scare viewers, keep them glued to the set, and hey, now it's commercial break, and come and buy this piece of junk you don't really need while your emotions are overriding your logic. Our collective awareness of the manipulations of "news" changed in The City that week. News is new--and perhaps useful--for a few hours; after that, it's too much speculation and subtle lies. We were back at work, everyone had power, everything was picked up but the wrecked highways, and according to the news, we were still in the midst of an active disaster.

The Oakland highway collapse was nasty, and it accounted for most of the deaths. The benefit to that is highways are designed differently now (small comfort to relatives of the victims, I'm sure). A 9.0 would still take several down, but for the most part, you can drive with more confidence on California's highways than on highways anywhere else--though Japan's are at least as well-built.

Cypress freeway 10/19/1989

I learned two small but useful lessons: bolt your bookcases and china/curio cases to the wall studs, and get earthquake museum gel for your breakables, an easy ounce of prevention. If you live anywhere on planet Earth, you can experience a quake. If you live in the New Madrid Seismic Zone, California, Alaska, Japan, New Zealand, you'd be wise to be well-prepared...and to trade in your brick home for a frame one, ASAP. Seriously, brick is a bad, bad building idea for earthquake zones. Remember, 63 people died in the Loma Prieta quake; over 100,000 died in a quake of the same magnitude in Haiti. Buildings are what kill people in quakes.

In most ways, I'm glad I had that experience. It certainly helped me to make my earthquake novel more realistic. My worst trauma today is seeing it is 25 years ago--man, that means I'm getting old! ;) I hope to be around to talk about it again at the 50th anniversary.