Category: Neighborhood groups

An excellent article by Michael Turton came out today in the Philipstown.info. It hit on important preparedness issues for cities in the east – or anywhere, for that matter.

Thanks to Wikipedia for this map.

(In case you aren’t familiar with this part of the country, the Town of Philipstown is in Putnam County, New York. Two incorporated villages lie within the Town. The Village of Cold Spring, focus of Turton’s article, is one of them. It lies across the river from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.)

If you don’t have time to read the whole article, here are highlights, with my comments. Every single one of these points could be an action item for your group or community!

1. Leadership. Set up a local committee if you don’t have one yet. Turton’s article refers to a specific committee being put together for the Village of Cold Spring. The Mayor and a Trustee sit on the committee, as well as residents.

2. Registry. Find out who in your community needs special care. First Responders need to know who lives where and what special circumstances exist, such as a need for oxygen or wheelchair access. Having this information allows them to check even before a storm hits. The Cold Spring committee is starting with volunteer participation in assembling a resident registry – but the committee is willing to consider a local law if necessary.

3. Local centers. Identify local venues that could serve as temporary respite centers – but not necessarily “shelters.” As reported in the article, a formal “shelter” may require security and medical personnel.

4. Emergency supplies. Put shelter in place as first priority, evacuation as second. Of course, shelter in place requires that people have survival kits for the first 72 hours, enough to get them home safely. And then, at home, they need more emergency supplies to carry them through.

5. Priorities. Set guidelines for the distribution of community resources: sandbags, medical supplies, pumps, fuel supplies, etc. Who gets first access?

6. Gawkers. Educate the community about the dangers of gawkers. (Aside from Virginia Nicols – This is a tough one! We’ve had neighbors get all in a huff when our local team kept them from driving right up to the site of a fire, impeding the fire department and hindering rescue efforts!)

7. Authority. Make sure people know HOW to turn off community utilities (gas, lights, etc.) and that the turn-off switches work in all conditions. (Another aside from Virginia: Authority to turn off community systems – such as natural gas distribution systems — needs to be limited, and those people need to be properly trained.)

Here in the west, more groups are forming this month to do precisely what the Village of Cold Spring has begun. What’s going on in YOUR community?  Let us know by sending a comment.

Virginia
Your Emergency Plan Guide Team

Which half do you fall into?

A poll conducted first in 2012 by the Adelphi University Center for Health Innovation — and repeated since then with the same results —  revealed the following:

◊  48% of Americans don’t have a survival kit or emergency supplies.
◊  Americans believe they can survive an average of 16 days in their homes . . .but over half don’t have even a 3-day supply of non-perishable food and water.
◊ 55% of Americans believe that “authorities” will come to their rescue when disaster strikes.

If you had been a part of this poll, which half of the group would you have fallen into – the half with a survival kit and emergency supplies, or the half counting on someone else to take care of them?

Are you a “taker?”

There has always been political talk about our American Society being “a society of takers.” Most of the rhetoric has been distasteful, some has been ridiculous.

But when it comes to disaster preparedness, there does seem to be a “taker” group — a group that somehow expects others to take care of them. In my estimation, that “taker” half of the population seems to be either lazy, in denial or just plain . . . well, you add in your own best word there!

September is National Preparedness Month. People around the country are planning events to get neighbors and neighborhoods involved. Joe and I will be part of the activity: we typically have three different activities on our calendar this month!

When it comes right down to it, though, there’s only so much we can do. Ultimately, it is up to individuals.

It’s up to individuals . . . meaning you.

Remember that great advertising line, “He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother.”? Here’s another version aimed at disaster preparedness: “It’s not hard, it’s just common sense.”  The first three steps are particularly easy:

1. Build or buy a survival kit for yourself and for each person you care about. Here’s a link to our updated Top 10 List Of Emergency Items for your kits. Or, if you just don’t have time to put them together, buy pre-made kits. Check out our emergency supply kit reviews to be sure you’re getting the most for your money.

2. Buy some extra food and water every time you shop, and stick it in the back of the cupboard. Eat from the front.

3. Get to know your neighbors. They are the ones who will already be there in an emergency. They are the ones who will come to your rescue, not the authorities.

Three simple steps will put you in the other half of the equation – where you belong!

Please share this article with the people around you. The more prepared they are, the safer YOU will be. And the better you’ll sleep at night.

Virginia Nicols

Your Emergency Plan Guide Team

You’ve seen this again and again.  “The more prepared your neighbors are, the safer you will be!” If this makes sense to you, and you want to do something about it, consider putting on a Community Preparedness Fair.

The Home Depot – the place to start

As I’ve mentioned before, I have a Google Alert set for the words “Emergency Preparedness” and “Disaster Preparedness.” Every day I get notices of community programs – typically sponsored by city governments – aimed at raising awareness about emergency planning.

But every once in a while, I see something else tucked in the list. That is, an announcement of a “Community Fair” being supported by The Home Depot.

Sponsor or participant, or both

Sometimes the store takes the lead in putting on a sort of expo. Sometimes the store is one of several related organizations participating. For example, from today’s Google Alert:

“San Bernardino County (California) residents wanting to be better prepared for disasters may attend a community safety fair Saturday in Fontana. The fair, organized by Home Depot, San Bernardino County Disaster Corps and San Bernardino County Fire Department’s Office of Emergency Services, will be from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at The Home Depot store. “

“The East 1488 Community Association and East 1488 Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) (Houston, Texas) will hold its fourth annual Emergency Preparedness Fair on Saturday, May 4, from 9 a.m. until 3 p.m. in the Home Depot Parking lot. Booths will have information and displays by first responders and emergency related organizations.”

Earlier, I saw this reference to the Lake Arrowhead (Cherokee County, Georgia) Preparedness Fair: “Come see a huge collection of Emergency Responders, Law Enforcement, Emergency Management, Amateur Radio Communications, and community emergency response personnel and equipment (subject to availability) along with dozens of vendors specializing in emergency preparedness, disaster response, and household safety. Home Depot is sponsoring the Safe Kids Fun Zone.”

Could your neighborhood team plan and execute a community fair?

From a neighborhood safety standpoint, this is one of the most effective things you could do to raise awareness and stimulate preparedness in your community. If I were tasked with putting on another such fair, The Home Depot is where I’d start.

We put on such a fair about a year ago. And yes, The Home Depot was our major sponsor. They brought their own tables, set up samples of preparedness items, took orders for them, and a couple of weeks later actually made one big delivery to our clubhouse!  Our local CERT then sorted and distributed everything.

If you are part of a group, consider putting a preparedness expo on your calendar. It may take several months to plan, but the results will be far-reaching. Start by talking to the manager of your local Home Depot store. I can bet you’ll find good support there.

(If you are truly interested, I’d be happy to share some of the planning steps that we went through. Just drop me a line in the comment box below.)

Other resources for community organizing:

CERT training

Organize your Neighborhood

Building a CERT Group — Identifying Leaders

CERT activates for a Missing Child

CERT Volunteers get their assignment. Photo thanks to OC Register and Lt. Bill Whalen of Irvine PD

Two weeks ago, at 9:30 at night, our phone began to ring. At the same time, my cell phone buzzed and a message came up on my computer screen: “This is not a test.”

Irvine police were calling on their volunteer support teams, including CERT, to respond to an emergency – a missing child. He had left home around 7 p.m., and disappeared into the night. The police department had already been searching on foot, with dogs and a helicopter, to no avail.

The police decided to activate their volunteers. According to the newspaper account, the Lieutenant in charge expected about 10 people to show up. They did, within 10 minutes. Within the next two hours, 130 people showed up!

The volunteers included members of both CERT, which is over 600 strong in Irvine, and IDEC, the Irvine Disaster Emergency Communications (amateur radio volunteers). Groups combed the area until 2:15 a.m. Police also used footage from local buses to try to capture information about the boy.

Ultimately, he emerged from a movie theatre in an adjoining town, and prevailed on a helpful citizen to take him home.

Take-aways from the event, according to the police:

• The iAlert system for this community works. (I can attest to that! Read more about the iAlert program here: Severe Weather Alerts)
• Regular trainings for CERT volunteers have kept the group engaged and willing to participate. (Irvine CERT holds regular, nearly monthly, trainings and community service activities.)
• Organizers were hard-pressed to manage the number of volunteers that showed up. It was unprecedented.

A CERT simulation for this exact scenario had been scheduled for later this month, but it was cancelled. The real thing was better than any simulation would have been.

As an aside, here in our local neighborhood, another six people have signed up to take the no-cost city-sponsored CERT training that starts in July. It consists of 8 evening sessions, in which people review basic first aid, search and rescue and disaster psychology. Graduates get the chance to handle tools, practice with a fire extinguisher, and come out with a kit bag full of emergency equipment including flashlight, hard hat, dust mask and gloves.

Action item: Interested in CERT training in YOUR community? Head to the FEMA website’s State Directory at: www.FEMA.gov/community-emergency-response-teams .

Are you a homeowner, property owner, remodeler or home builder, or home energy specialist? Take three and one-half minutes to watch this video showing retrofit steps for protecting a home against damage from earthquake and winter storms.

Click image to see 3 minute video on home remodel

The video was posted on YouTube by the Canadian Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction (ICLR) in partnership with Desjardins Insurance.

Most of the steps are simple and would apply to ALL homes, no matter where they are located. As an owner, you could consider having these changes made to your home or rental properties.  As a member of the construction industry, you might want to recommend these changes to customers.

Some of the work you could do yourself, like installing a fire extinguisher. (The video recommends “at least one in every home.” We think you probably need more than one: in the kitchen, for sure, but in the garage, too, or in the laundry room area.)

You would need a licensed professional’s help for some of the other items, like installing a generator or snow melting system along the roof edge.

Even if you aren’t in an area prone to earthquakes, a number of the suggestions in the video will apply, enhancing your home’s security and safety as well as your ability to function in a number of emergency situations. In some cases, making these improvements might even give you a discount on home insurance costs.

If this video is of interest to you, you may also want to review these more detailed home improvement advisories. Whatever you can do to protect your home will help you sleep better at night. Plus, it may help with the resale value!

• Improving Building Safety – Interior
• Improving Building Safety – Chimneys
• Improving Building Safety – Windows

What other improvements do you think people should consider? Drop your suggestions into the comments box below!

Thanks.

Virginia Nicols
Emergency Plan Guide Team

A Frenzy of Recent Activity!

If you track the news like I do, you will have seen, over just the past couple of months, literally hundreds of cities announcing “Emergency Preparedness Training” meetings. Some of these meetings are sponsored by the local fire department. Some are held in conjunction with the local college. Some are aimed at children; a few have senior citizens as their target audience. Occasionally even an elected official takes the time to make an appearance.

All this activity seems to have been accelerated by our experiencing one disaster after another over the past few years. Lately, they seem to be happening even more frequently: storms, hurricanes, flooding, explosions, bombings . . . the list goes on.

Will these meetings make any difference?

From the standpoint of community preparedness, I welcome all this attention.

From the standpoint of being a trained Community Emergency Response Team member, I realize that a bunch of one-time meetings are just a start. Just a start! It takes weeks and months for people to change their level of general awareness. It takes them weeks and months and sometimes years to get around to taking even the most elementary precautions or preparations.

Which brings me to the point of this article . . .

Our ten-year track record!

Ready and willing to help

Here in our local community, our CERT team has been actively building a plan, recruiting, training, assembling supplies, working with the local authorities – for nearly 10 years now.

Last week was no exception to our regular efforts. We held one of our annual training exercises. It involved Block Captains “discovering” emergencies located around the neighborhood, then taking the appropriate action and recording what they did.

Afterwards, we all got together with cookies and discussed what people had done, and what they might have done better.

While the “emergencies” were ones we might reasonably expect – a train wreck on the tracks next to one row of homes, an earthquake, a live shooter event, a wild fire requiring evacuation – the responses were also what one might reasonably expect.

The important thing – no one really had to think about what to do! After years of talking and writing articles and inviting neighbors in for coffee and a slide show…after a hundred meetings with as few as three people to more like 60 people in the group, it’s all paying off.

Now that’s progress!

Home ownership, the standard

Most descriptions of preparing for disaster seem to focus on a single family home and how its residents should prepare. These descriptions include making changes to the building itself, like installing braces or safety glass or reinforcing the chimney or roof. Some families go so far as to fortify their homes or to build totally separate disaster shelters.

Naturally, the family stores large quantities of water and food and perhaps invests in emergency equipment like solar panels or generators. The family also is reminded to include emergency preparations for pets.

But what about renters?

But if you are one of the 35% of all households that live in rented homes and particularly in apartments, options may be different – and limited. You probably have far less square footage to start with. You are not likely to have outside area where emergency items could be securely stored or easily accessed. And you certainly would not be allowed to make any structural changes to make the building any sturdier or safer.

What can apartment dwellers do differently?

1. Be efficient!

Your requirements are every bit as important as those of a family living in a single family home, but you will definitely have to be cleverer in order to store even the basics. The smart apartment dweller will become an expert in high-nutritional-value, low-bulk food and in multi-purpose tools and equipment. Instead of investing in a generator, the apartment dweller may need to invest in storage containers that can be hidden under the bed, stacked 8 feet high in a closet, or converted to use as an end-table.

2. Be creative!

Whereas someone with plenty of space outside can store emergency water in a 55 gallon barrel, you may have to make do with a variety of individual bottles, supplemented with a supply of expandable bottles, to be filled at the last minute. Given your limited ability to store water, you may be putting your filtration equipment to use immediately as you are forced to supplement your original water supply.

3. Make friends!

In an apartment setting, neighbors can make all the difference. A group of people can cooperate in assembling and storing food, tools, and other essentials. (For example, two families could share one stove.) One neighbor may have handyman skills and tools; another might have medical training; a third might be a competent cook. Sharing the burdens and responsibilities may serve the entire community better than each person trying to fend for him or herself.

For a whole lot of ideas about organizing your neighbors, check out Emergency Preparedness for Apartment Communities. It discusses getting your own preparedness act together and then helping neighbors get prepared, too.

Like maps?

If you are a map fan, check out FEMA’s Map Service Center to see whether you’re in a flood zone. The map is designed for ordinary citizens, but also for real estate and insurance specialists, who can create printouts coordinated with the Digital Flood Insurance Rate Map.

Starting in May, 2013, the map service is being expanded and upgraded. But in the meanwhile, you can do what I did to check out your own home and community. It’s easy!

Check FEMA’s map service.

Here’s the link. www.msc.fema.gov.

Do a “Product Search” by filling in your address. A second screen will come up identifying your general area (county). Click on “View” and be patient as the data loads. Ultimately, you’ll be rewarded with a very small map of your area!

Red arrows point to flood zone markings

You can adjust the scale at the top of the screen. (I changed the 4% to 15 % and that gave me a much better size map, and I could read most of the street names.) You can also click on the “pan” button on the left (looks like a little hand) and move the map around. (Again, be patient since it’s a lot of data and the map re-adjusts slowly.)

Once you’ve found the right area and the right level of detail, search for overlays. In our example, the gray dotted area (left arrow in the illustration) indicates a 500-year-flood zone, and the bright blue color (right arrow in the illustration) indicates a 100-year-flood zone, which means there’s a 1 percent chance of a 1-foot or higher flood in that area in any given year.

How would you be affected?

In the illustration, our home is not in the flood zone. But the blue area happens to be a key highway/railroad overpass/underpass. This interchange is about one mile from our neighborhood, so a flood there would definitely impact our emergency response, particularly if an evacuation were called for.

Check out this resource for your neighborhood, and also for your business or place of work. It’s interesting and good information to have.

Virginia
Your Emergency Plan Guide Team

We’ve added more information about flood insurance. Check it out here.

Without being paranoid about it, you need to be aware when danger is heading your way. Some things, of course, can’t be anticipated. But tornados, storms, floods, ice – these you can be ready for! Here’s how to find out what’s coming:

Local weather channel on T.V.

Watching the local weather news is the easy option, of course. But most of us don’t have the “luxury” of having a T.V. available whenever we want.

Regional weather map on Weather.com

Severe Weather Alerts on your tablet or computer

Head to www.weather.com , find your regional map and read about what’s coming. You can bookmark this page so you can find it readily. Typing in your zip code will give you even more local detail.

iAlert

This is a message service managed by your local law enforcement or emergency management service that alerts you by text message, automated phone call or email whenever there is an emergency.  (weather related, traffic emergency or crime related) You can find out if your city has the service and sign up for alerts here: http://ialert.com

Mobile Phone Hurricane App

The American Red Cross offers an app that will help you monitor conditions in your own area or where family members live, find help, and let others know you’re safe with one click of a button. It can warn you with a siren sound, and even turns your phone into a flashlight with strobe if you’re trapped. From your mobile phone, call “**REDCROSS” (**73327677) and you’ll be sent a link for downloading to your phone.

Other severe weather apps

A few minutes online and you will discover many other apps. Some of them might be sponsored by an organization right in your town, like the local news channel. Others may be offered by insurance companies or other organizations.

As you surf, you’ll see that some apps work only on specific phones. Some are free, others may cost a couple of dollars.

Action Item: If you carry a smart phone, invest a few minutes in checking out “severe weather apps” either online or right on your phone through the iTunes Store. Try a couple of the apps that make sense for your locality and your circumstances. (Get your kids to help if you haven’t downloaded an app yet.)

This is one emergency preparation action that is easy and fun!

Guidebook to home defense

We’ve said this before and no doubt we’ll repeat it more than once in the future. But the recent school shooting in Newtown has given new life to the continuing controversy about firearms – especially assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, etc. – for self-protection. If you’ve watched any of the “Doomsday Preppers” TV shows on the NatGeo Channel, you may have been shocked by the extent that some people go to for their imagined need for survival in a major catastrophe. Their arsenals look more like preparation for war.

Here are three things to think about if you are truly worried about having to protect yourself and your property in the event of a major disaster event. The first two are, in our opinion, negative approaches to life.  The third is in keeping with our philosophy of taking positive action.

Assault weapons are a terrible choice.

First, as any combat veteran will tell you, few people have the natural ability to calmly shoot people with a handgun, much less a rapid-firing assault weapon. Such weapons require training and discipline if you ONLY plan to hit a specific target while the adrenalin is flowing fast and heavy. The chances of hitting innocent people or things around and beyond the target are usually very high. There’s a reason mass murders use these weapons . . . they kill and destroy indiscriminately.

Shotguns aren’t a whole lot better.

Second, the best firearm in a self-defense circumstance is usually a shotgun. It has a limited range but a “spread” in the shot pattern that makes it more likely to hit the intended target on the first shot. You don’t have to be a marksman or highly-trained soldier to be effective with it. The bottom line, however, is if you find yourself having to use it, it’s still likely to take someone’s life. And, regardless of the situation, even if there is no legal consequence, that’s something you will have to live with.

Trusted Friends — Absolutely Your Best Protection.

Third, and most important of all in our opinion, your best protection in an emergency will be good neighbors – people you know and can trust immediately, instead of mistrust. We have seen over and over again the natural tendency of people to help one another following a catastrophic event. And, the more your neighbors are trained and prepared to survive themselves, the better equipped they will be to help you and vice versa. Unlike the first two means of self-protection, you can count on having enough friends if you have allowed for them.  And unlike the first two means of self-protection, this is one that saves lives instead of taking them.

Programs like the Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) training are excellent examples of the best way to prepare yourself and to work along the side your neighbors as an effective team. CERT neighborhoods will not only have a better chance of surviving, but will emerge as a true community with pride in having known what to do in advance . . . and possibly having saved lives and property because of their training.