The Chronic Disaster: Poverty

…chronic conditions as well as acute events can induce trauma, and this, too, belongs in our calculations. A chronic disaster is one that gathers force slowly and insidiously, creeping around one’s defenses rather than smashing through them. People are unable to mobilize their normal defenses against the threat, sometimes because they have elected consciously or unconsciously to ignore it, sometimes because they have been misinformed about it, and sometimes because they cannot do anything to avoid it in any case. -- Kai Ericson

I’ve been following disaster scholar Scott Knowles for a while now on Twitter, and he uses the term “slow disaster” to talk about poverty, and it was his posts that made me want to write this article. We need to look, he and others say, more at economically disadvantaged people and how disasters affect them more—harder and for longer—than they do more advantaged people.

One of Haiti's tent cities, still plentiful 8 years after the big quake

We’ve seen this in the US this past hurricane season at the macro level. Texas and Florida got a lot of attention and relief, while Puerto Rico, poorer to begin with, received less. As I write this, it’s over a hundred days after Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, and half the people do not yet have electricity. Imagine that happening in Florida and the outcry there’d be.

This becomes a problem for several reasons

Poor people live in substandard housing, which is more vulnerable in an earthquake, tornado, or hurricane. Poor people are more likely to build in flood plains unprotected by good levees.
Poor people have less of a voice in governments. Poor people seldom run for local office (often an unpaid job at the beginning level) and never develop a political career that goes farther. Even at a local level, they might be on the zoning board, but several of my relatives were on zoning boards, and I promise you, that’s a time suck. Who can afford that kind of public service but people who are already financially comfortable—whether because of retirement or a high income or a wealthy spouse. And so poor people and their concerns—their safety, their education, their needs, and their very lives—are not a part of the public discourse about safety or defense against disaster.

Poor people have fewer resources when the disaster hits. I think this whenever television talks to a homeowner who has behind him, the day after a storm surge, six guys working on tearing out his drywall. “The wife has the Sharpeis and is at a hotel,” he says, nonchalantly. I promise you, there are poor people living ten miles from him who couldn’t think of staying in a hotel, have to do the work themselves, and have to live in damp, moldy, dangerous homes while they struggle along. If they are renting, good luck getting a landlord to come right out and fix a bad situation. (something I was recently reminded of when renting for the first time in years, when the landlord refused to repair a series of problems, from bats to crickets to lead-laced water to a broken toilet. As I’m not poor, I just said “(Forget) you!” and moved, but were I truly poor, that might not be an option.)

Recovery takes longer for poor people. Few can afford renter’s insurance. Some lose their jobs because a car is destroyed and they can’t afford another to get to work. One big natural disaster hit on a poor family can mean no more chances to leave poverty, a life lived out suffering from the downstream effects, which can snowball and carry into the next generation. Nor might they have health insurance, and probably not mental health coverage, so any trauma they experienced goes untreated. Families can deteriorate in such a situation, and that leads to—yes, you guessed it—worsening poverty.

TV crews tend not to go into poor areas to interview disaster survivors. They aren’t as pretty to film, the producers and directors assume no one wants to see squalor, and perhaps the poor aren’t as articulate. So we tend to forget about those truly in need, the working poor, the homeless, and the dispossessed.

For more on the topic, you can read articles at
http://www.preventionweb.net/risk/poverty-inequality

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.

Hurricane Harvey

I blog often about hurricanes during the season, and you can click on the word "hurricanes" at the tail end of the post to see more, but I wanted to talk about Harvey a bit.

defense.gov image

First of all, I am not without sympathy for the people who lost everything during the storm. Many of them were poor to begin with, and now they have nothing, and nothing to rebuild with. It's tragic.

However...there are a couple of howevers in all this.

1) The City of Houston has been making stupid zoning decisions for a long, long time. I've seen interviews with their own emergency managers on The Weather Channel dating back years, angry and desperate at this. They all KNEW this was coming. But instead of managing development, or requiring developers to deal with storm drainage, they let people build willy-nilly with no regard for the nature of their city, the problems they already have, or the fact that hurricanes hit that area of Texas every 10-20 years. They knew this was coming and apparently did not give a damn. And someone was lining their pockets. Developers, definitely. Elected city officials? Well, there are kickbacks that are traceable and those that are not, the "we golf at the same place and give each other's kids jobs" sort of glad-handing ways of politics everywhere.

So before you commit too much money to relief efforts, and before you cheerfully watch a billion dollars of federal tax money go to relief and think that's 100% okay, understand: they knew it was going to happen and they let it. They could have prevented a lot of the damage. If I ran the world (and I'd be a nasty fascist dictator, I suspect, so good thing I don't), I'd strip the wealth of every Houston developer and every Houston city council member. I'd leave them in nothing but their underwear, huddled on the sidewalk, all their accounts frozen, and see how they like it. And that money would go to poor people the city did not care about. Unfortunately, I don't rule the world. Rich people rule it, and you can be sure they have each other's backs on this. There won't even be a condition to the bail-out money that they change their zoning. There will be no justice, and the next hurricane will be as horrible for them and require another billion to bail them out again. I thought it was important you knew about this.

2) Be careful where you send your donations. The Red Cross, though administration-heavy, does get money and services to victims. Catholic Charities is another vetted organization. There is a Houston Food Bank, and there is a Houston Humane Society. Don't send money through GoFundMe or the like. There are as many scam artists as true victims there. I know it's appealing to think that if you avoid big agencies that no money will go to pay staff or for rent or so on, but better 70% of your money get to the victims than 100% go to a scammer.

3) Instead of only wringing your hands at the horrors you've seen on TV, think about your own locale, its natural disasters or the nearby chemical plants or nuke plants and rails on which dangerous chemicals are shipped, or a week-long power outage during extreme weather, and imagine the worst possible scenarios for you and your loved ones, turn off the TV, and make a plan:

A) In the first case, you have to grab and go. You have 10 minutes to do it. Most of us would spend that 10 minutes grabbing a child's favorite toy, the pets, the cell phone, and our old photo albums. Have a go-bag ready for every family member so you don't have to stop and pack clothes and shoes as well. Put a couple of pop-top cans of food or MREs in each bag and a few bottles of water. Help your kids pack their own bags. That will get you through a day where you're fleeing. And don't ever let your gas tank go under 1/2 a tank, because you really never know

B) In the second case, you are going to shelter in place and ride out a hurricane or ice storm or earthquake aftermath--either because you choose to or you haven't any choice. Don't wait until the last minute to gear up for this. Always have a five-day supply of emergency lighting, bottled water, canned food, some emergency cash, and other supplies you'll need. Go check out ready.gov for more specifics. You only need do this once, leave the food most accessible, and switch it out once a year. (I'm a big fan of wheeled trash cans for this purpose--then if you need to walk a mile to a shelter or friend's house, you can push the thing along.) If you keep this up, you won't have to fight crowds or arm-wrestle over the last AA batteries on the shelf.

fill me with emergency supplies

Again, I'm sorry for the people who were hurt by the hurricane, those who are homeless, those who lost everything or, worst of all, a loved one. I'm not callous. But I am a realist, and I don't want your tender emotions to lead you to bad decisions.

Shake out drill

Tomorrow is the GREAT SHAKE OUT earthquake drill, worldwide, at 10:20 local time. Drop. Cover. Hold On. If everyone did these simple things when the ground under their feet began to shake, many lives would be saved every year.

Bonus instruction: don't run outside in a city street to get killed by falling glass and gargoyles.

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.

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.

Links to hurricane articles

I read a couple good articles on hurricanes the past two days and wanted to share them with you.

First, why the Atlantic hurricane season is unlikely to be very bad (again) from scientist Angela Fritz.

The City of New Orleans recently updated its hurricane preparedness information. Cool graphic design makes it an appealing site to use.

Results of a Yale study suggest Connecticut residents are surprisingly reluctant to evacuate in case of a hurricane.

NOAA's Response and Restoration blog gives an interesting perspective on hurricanes and recovery.

Tornado emergency preparation

In North America, it's tornado season, and it will be for six more months.

Wikipedia Commons

Some reminders on preparation for these killer storms:

• Make your emergency plan now and discuss it with your family
• Find your "safe room," the best place in your home to survive a tornado
• Know where the designated shelter is at work or school
• Have a contact person and meeting place for your family at least a few miles away from home, should your home be destroyed and the cell phone towers taken down, too, preventing phone calls
• Prepare your emergency kit: a gallon of water per person and per pet, a battery-operated radio (a NOAA weather radio is ideal), canned food with pop tops and crackers and peanut butter (or equivalent), life-saving medicines, plastic bags for waste, work gloves, and a flashlight. This is the very minimum you should have, and you can google for more information on tornado emergency kits
• Keep photocopies of driver's licenses, insurance information, birth certificates, and other important information either at a relative's house, in a safety deposit box, or scanned and in the cloud
• Listen to the broadcast warnings and obey them
• Don't risk your life getting a video for youtube of a funnel cloud bearing down on you
• Obey police and fire when they tell you not to enter an area or structure, no matter how panicked you are about loved ones or how curious
• Don't be a tornado tourist if there's destruction near you. It's rude at best, dangerous to you and others, and places unnecessary strain on first responders who might be saving lives instead of trying to police you
• If you loot tornado victims, expect to be shot, and prosecuted, and shunned by decent people thereafter

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

Time to prep for winter emergencies

If you're in the Northern Hemisphere, and above tropical latitudes, it's time to prepare for winter emergencies.

In your car:

Get a safety check and top off all fluids

Check your wipers

Make sure you have your scraper/brush

In your trunk pack: blanket, battery operated radio, folding shovel, first aid kit, a box of crackers or granola bars, flares, chains, bag of sand for traction, extra socks, and flashlight (at the very least)

Don't let your fuel tank drop below 1/2 a tank

By Andre (Ice Storm 2009) , via Wikimedia Commons

At home:

Winterize water pipes

Have furnace and chimney checked on a regular schedule

Have lanterns, flashlights, and battery-operated radios if you lose power

Don't let your larder get too low--you may end up stuck for a week at home and unable to get to grocery stores. Don't forget pet food!

A fresh trash can with animal-proof lid makes a good emergency freezer in case of power outages. You can pull it outdoors, keep the house warm with wood (if you have a stove or fireplace) and food will stay cold if kept in the trash can outside in the shade next to the house. Be careful with insulin--you want it cool but not frozen, so find a place near a window or in the basement where you can keep it safely, should power go out for a long time

Keep the needs of elderly, disabled, and shut-in neighbors in mind. A good neighbor has saved many a life in a bad ice storm

Shakeout!

Shakeout is a worldwide earthquake drill. At 10:16 local time on 10-16, you pretend there's an earthquake.

If you want to go beyond that, put a pair of hiking boots, with a flashlight tucked into one, and hardhat or bike helmet next to them, and put them under your bed on 10/16. If an earthquake happens at night, it's right there, within easy reach. But if you do the basic drill--at home or the office or school or the public library--and encourage others to as well, it'll take you one minute. I saw this work in 1989 to prevent injuries. No doorways. Don't run outside. Protect yourself from falling debris.

Drop. Cover. Hold on. It's simple!

In memory of the Mount Ontake dead

As of this post, there are 50 dead, 16 still missing. The volcano continues to put out dangerous gasses and ash. The 50 cm of ash built up on some slopes will contribute to a dangerous lahar when rains come. About a million tons of ash have fallen now--and it's a relatively small eruption.

Mount Ontake in calmer days

It's dangerous to hike on a volcano. Most eruptions have warning signs, but warnings can be misread...and worse, unheeded. This phreatic eruption--there was no warning for it. What could have saved people already up there enjoying their pleasant hike when the eruption came out of a lovely blue sky? Hard hats would have saved a few (though few of us want to go hiking in hard hats). A lightweight addition to your backpack is a dust mask--that might save you from deadly amounts of ash getting into your lungs and suffocating you. But nothing can save you once you're surrounded by toxic gas.

So be careful out there, hikers in the Cascades and Andes. Volcanoes are beautiful...but they can be deadly.