# 2471
(With apologies to Louis Pasteur)
Every year thousands of Americans are forced to evacuate their homes - sometimes for only a few hours, sometimes for days . . . and sometimes permanently.
Fires, tornadoes, floods, hurricanes, chemical spills, and even terrorist attacks are all realistic threats. And many can happen with little or no warning.
The fires this weekend in Los Angeles are a perfect example. Hundreds of homes destroyed, and more than 10,000 people evacuated.
This from AP News.
Hungry LA fires reduce hundreds of homes to ash
Nov 15, 10:54 PM (ET)
LOS ANGELES (AP) - Southern Californians endured a third day of destruction Saturday as wind-blasted wildfires torched hundreds of mobile homes and mansions, forced tens of thousands of people to flee and shut down major freeways.
No deaths were reported, but the Los Angeles police chief said he feared authorities might find bodies among the 500 burned dwellings in a devastated mobile home park that housed many senior citizens.
"We have almost total devastation here in the mobile park," Fire Capt. Steve Ruda said. "I can't even read the street names because the street signs are melting."
The series of fires has injured at least 20 people and destroyed hundreds of homes from coastal Santa Barbara to inland Riverside County, on the other side of the Los Angeles area. Smoke blanketed the nation's second-largest city Saturday, reducing the afternoon sun to a pale orange disk.
In September, we watched as thousands of people evacuated Galveston Island and Crystal Beach in the face of an oncoming Hurricane Ike.
Remnants of Crystal Beach After Ike
Two months later, thousands of those people are still displaced, their homes either lost or seriously damaged.
In truth, no one is immune from the risk of having to evacuate their home. It needn't be due to something as exotic as a hurricane.
A gas leak or a house fire could happen to just about any of us at any time.
And with the arrival of cooler weather, we are entering the Home Fire season. In 2007, there were 414,000 residential fires, resulting in 2,895 deaths and 14,000 injuries.
Fatal Home Fires Jumped Nearly 68% during Cooler Months
WASHINGTON, D.C. – “Home fire season” starts now, and the U.S. Fire Administration (USFA) is working to make this year’s cold months safer than last years—when there was a dramatic increase in home fire deaths. According to the USFA, during the “home fire season” of October 2007 to March 2008, there was a 68% increase in the number of fatal home fires and a 67% increase in the number of people killed in home fires, compared to the warmer months.
Here is the advice from Ready.gov. They call for every family to have an Emergency Supply Kit, sometimes known as a BOB, or Bug Out Bag.
Step 1: Get A Kit
- Get an Emergency Supply Kit,which includes items like non-perishable food, water, a battery-powered or hand-crank radio, extra flashlights and batteries. You may want to prepare a portable kit and keep it in your car. This kit should include:
- Copies of prescription medications and medical supplies;
- Bedding and clothing, including sleeping bags and pillows;
- Bottled water, a battery-operated radio and extra batteries, a first aid kit, a flashlight;
- Copies of important documents: driver’s license, Social Security card, proof of residence, insurance policies, wills, deeds, birth and marriage certificates, tax records, etc.
Step 2: Make a Plan
Prepare your family
- Make a Family Emergency Plan. Your family may not be together when disaster strikes, so it is important to know how you will contact one another, how you will get back together and what you will do in case of an emergency
- Plan places where your family will meet, both within and outside of your immediate neighborhood.
- It may be easier to make a long-distance phone call than to call across town, so an out-of-town contact may be in a better position to communicate among separated family members.
- You may also want to inquire about emergency plans at places where your family spends time: work, daycare and school. If no plans exist, consider volunteering to help create one.
- Plan to Evacuate
- Identify ahead of time where your family will meet, both within and outside of your immediate neighborhood.
- Identify several places you could go in an emergency, a friend's home in another town, a motel or public shelter.
- If you do not have a car, plan alternate means of evacuating.
- If you have a car, keep a half tank of gas in it at all times in case you need to evacuate.
- Take your Emergency Supply Kit.
- Take your pets with you, but understand that only service animals may be permitted in public shelters. Plan how you will care for your pets in an emergency.
- Take a Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) class from your local Citizen Corps chapter. Keep your training current.
While this blog often uses a pandemic scenario to advocate personal preparedness and responsibility, there are plenty of other threats that occur each and every day around the nation, and the world, that cry out for such actions.
Being prepared may not prevent a crisis, but it can help you manage it better. Far too often people compound a problem simply because they were unprepared to deal with an emergency.
We always think it will never happen to us. If we are lucky, maybe it won't. But for millions of people every year, their luck runs out.
If you don't have an emergency kit, if you don't have a well stated family plan, today is a good day to begin.
And once you have a minimum 72-hour emergency kit, you can then begin to prepared for bigger emergencies, such as a pandemic.
Good places to get started include:
FEMA http://www.fema.gov/index.shtm
READY.GOV http://www.ready.gov/
AMERICAN RED CROSS http://www.redcross.org/
For Pandemic Preparedness Information:
For more in-depth emergency preparedness information I can think of no better resource than GetPandemicReady.Org. Admittedly, as a minor contributor to that site, I'm a little biased.
But whether you are preparing for 72-hours, for two-weeks, or three-months, the important thing is to get started.
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