Category: Emergency

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Scheduling Your Preparedness

This is such a great subject to discuss, scheduling your preparedness, and for a number of different reasons.  First, if you’re new to preparedness, and there are many of you out there, it can be very daunting to start.  As you do start, you begin to realize very quickly how far behind you may be.  By scheduling out your preparedness, you can see the positive changes taking place, which will help you to stay organized making sure you’re not missing something in your initial planning.

Anyone Can Gain From Scheduling Their Preparedness

If you’ve been a prepper for some time already, by going through this type of process, you can set yourself on a regular schedule, causing you and your family/community to stay prepared for the long run.

As well, consider if you’ve been focused on preparedness, but tend to focus more on one area than another.  For instance, maybe you like the security aspect of preparedness, and not the medical aspects.  Or maybe you’re very into homesteading and keeping yourself fed during difficult times, but have no real idea around security.  Scheduling out your preparedness to include all the different areas will help you and your family to be better equipped.  

Finally, if you’re a long time prepper and feel you’re the best and most prepared, then you may have already missed one major point of preparedness.  That is, to always be learning and to always be improving.  If you feel you’ve reached a point and you’ve got all your security bases covered, maybe it’s time to have a friend review it with you.  If you feel your family can be fed consistently, even in difficult times, maybe it’s time to consider how you can help others in their times of need.  So let’s look at some ways to schedule your preparedness, for now, as a person with beginner or intermediate knowledge of preparedness.

Examples of Scheduling Your Preparedness

Most government Offices of Emergency Management create some form of preparedness for the public at large.  This really can be a great place to start.  Examples of what some provide are shown above.  Eventually, your plan and how you will react for yourself should depend upon your needs.  You should not rely on any external organization, government or other, to solve your own preparedness challenges.  But “borrowing” from these organizations, at the very least, to get you started and develop a schedule and plan will help get much closer to the goal, much sooner.  

For example, the FEMA website, ready.gov shows the following diagram in their Communication Plan documentation:

If you were to take each of these 12 areas and focus on just one per month over the next year, you would find yourself much closer to your family being fully prepared for any natural, and perhaps even man-made, disaster.  You would also find that, as you dive into one of the twelve shown, it may drive you to others.  Learning to go with the flow will only help the effort.  

You might start, in your first month, with simply signing up for “Alerts and Warnings”.  And as you’re researching this effort, you find that several of the apps created for such a purpose are written or sponsored by one of the local Community Emergency Response Teams (CERT).  As you find out more about CERT, this can help you “become more involved in your community”. CERT may give you opportunities to train in basic emergency response, and CPR and First Aid.  Which then can make you more of a resource and you to “Plan more with your Neighbors”.  At this point, you’ve already touched on several of the list of twelve.  

To be clear, I’m not suggesting this is the only way to create a schedule for you to start on your path of preparedness.  But by doing even a small amount of research and putting some form of a schedule in place, you can be more confident the plan will include the many different aspects of preparedness. 

Preparing for Clean Air

Another example of creating a schedule is to use the survival rule of threes, ordering them by priority, and then placing them into regular intervals of achievement.  Starting with air and shelter, give yourself a timeline, for instance, you might start by setting a goal to have enough N95 masks for your entire family.  This became incredibly apparent during the early days of the Covid pandemic of 2020.  Then, we must ensure each person is properly trained on how to apply the mask and at what point the mask becomes useless against different threats, and training is key here.  

Preparing Your Shelter (Your Home)

For shelter, first ensure your home is properly cared for, whether single family dwelling, large piece of land or apartment.  It’s important to make sure the chances of losing your home are very very slim.  Having properly managed finances becomes key, of course, making sure you are living well within your means of income.  If not, find a way to move to a home that fits within your means.  Then of course, be sure the property is insured correctly, so if a loss of home is incurred due to disaster, you’re not left homeless.  

Finally, still focusing on shelter, if you own a home or property, living within your means, also indicates you know how much per year it will cost to maintain that home.  This can be a difficult pill to swallow.  Many people just live in their home until something starts to fall apart, without regular maintenance, and they are always surprised when the roof or furnace needs replacing.  If you perform your own maintenance on your home, you’re already a step ahead because you might be more likely to see something coming.  But, if you don’t, then take a look around your home.  Consider all major appliances, windows, doors, roofs, and try to remember when’s the last time they were serviced.  They are all working to protect or provide for you, so do yourself a favor and get them serviced.  In doing this, you’ll come to realize that this will help you to plan ahead and budget to replace an item, rather than have it fail on you unexpectedly.

As you can see, preparing for shelter may be a bit more of a project than just a single month, because there are so many different areas to consider.  So you may schedule this out over a period of time.  

Preparing Your Water Stores

Next, you can start moving on to collecting water.  Water is incredibly important, and something that can be relatively simple to plan,  It does however require space, so once you settle on a means of collection, plan to stick to that style.  I personally have chosen the single gallon bottles from Crystal Geyser as my storage method.  These bottles are semi-square in nature.  So it makes storing them much easier in my shelving apparatus, and each bottle has a fairly strong handle that makes it easy to pick up multiple bottles at one time.  Within a 4 foot area, I can generally hold about 25 gallons per shelf.  Three or four shelves and I have enough water for most likely events.  Oh yea, and just about every other week, there’s a sale at 10 for 10 bucks!  This is not to say this is the only means of water collection, but it does allow for excellent ways to acquire, manage and store it.  And of course, I can use these bottles as a normal part of our daily routine and keep cycling out older bottles over time.

Preparing Your Food Stores

This brings up an important point now as we start to transition into food storage.  Cycling in new food, and cycling out older food stores.  There’s a concept in some preparedness circles called “Shopping Your Pantry”.  It simply means two things.  First, when you go to the grocery store a large part of the shopping effort should be to replenish items used from your pantry.  So when you see those sales of two items for seven bucks, or something similar, you pick them up in order to build up your reserves at home.   Depending on your financial situation it could be one or two weeks to build up your pantry, or it could be several months.  But once you do this, you will start to realize how easy it can be to build up a reserve.  You can easily meet and exceed the recommended 1-2 weeks of food reserves in your pantry.  

Second, when you schedule your meals for the upcoming week, plan to look in your pantry first, or “shop” in your pantry for items for the next week of meals. Overall, you may find your grocery bills start going down because you’re able to use what you already have, and only shop for the things you need.  One important point here for those of you health conscious fans out there.  There’s nothing that can replace fresh fruits, veggies and meat.  So, I’m not saying store up on a bunch of packaged meals.  Far from it.  In fact augmenting your groceries with locally grown (even in your own garden or homestead) fruits and vegetables will only help you, and besides it gives you such a feeling of accomplishment to know that the food on your table came from you very own garden.  Just remember, that as you stock up for short term emergency responses, you need to increase your stock with food you would normally eat.  This way you can keep it also on a regular cycle of replenishing foods you’ve eaten with new stocks.

Preparing for Protection

Now that your air, shelter, water and food are taken care of, you can continue with scheduling out how you will protect yourself and your family and eventually assist in protecting your community.  Consider firearms, with proper training and preparation, clearly firearms can be the great equalizer in home invasions, or similar type events, but if for some reason you’re uncomfortable or improperly trained, they can be more dangerous than beneficial.  Really consider this topic and if you decide to move in the direction of any form of firearm, absolutely obtain professional training as soon as possible.

Alternatively, obtaining training in some form of martial arts or combat sport, can help in many dangerous situations.  Examples might be Krav Maga, which is an Israeli Combat form that teaches people self protection with defence and simultaneous counter attack.  I personally feel there are no other self defense skills that will better serve an average person.  However, Krav Maga can also be quite stressful on the body’s joints, so as a person starts to get older, you might consider another form of martial art such as Jiu Jitsu.  If you’ve ever seen some of the early days of the UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship), there is one particular person that stands out.  His name is Royce Gracie, and is a 185 pound guy that hails from Brazil.  He came into the UFC and faced some of the biggest, most violent opponents and with his calm demeanor proceeded to put them to sleep, or cause them to tap-out in submission due to the severe pain he was causing.  That… is Jiu Jitsu!  Very powerful and perfectly designed for just about anyone wanting to protect themselves.

And finally, for protection, there are always non-deadly options for self defense.  The only thing I would recommend here is be very aware of your local laws related to these types of items.  Some knives, batons, and stun guns fall under the same category as firearms when it comes to them being used in deadly force.  So absolutely do you research first before you settle on your perfect instrument of self-protection.  I have two highly recommended items I typically suggest for people getting started.  First, the Fast-Strike Personal Safety Whip, which is a perfect tool for an average person just trying to be prepared for hiking, biking, running, or just walking home from work at night.

And then second is a fairly common tool, often referred to as the “can of mace”.  I say this in quotes because I think there are better alternatives to the traditional spray.  Namely, the SABRE RED Pepper Gel Spray for Runners, or something similar.  This little tool is great because it’s so light and unobtrusive, yet very effective if you find yourself in a potentially dangerous situation.  Just point, and spray, and this GEL, will cover and stick to a person’s face causing a fairly severe reaction by a perpetrator.  The nice thing about a gel, rather than the spray, is when in a windy environment, sprays can just as easily get whipped back in your direction causing issues for you and your own eyesight.  With the gel, this is no longer an issue.

Whatever means you use, just continue to focus on the purpose of the protection while undergoing your training or research.  If your goal is to “Protect this House”, this can often be done pretty well with a shotgun and a box of shells (again, with proper training and understanding of the weapon).  But if you’re more comfortable with using martial arts as your primary defense, make sure the training you receive is designed to protect you in specific dangerous scenarios.  It won’t do you any good to learn Karate Kata for 3 months (no offense Karate fans…  Heh heh), and never know how to respond when a person attacks you from behind one late night after work.

I hope you’ve gained some understanding from this blog on how you might start on your road to preparedness by scheduling out the different areas.  It may seem daunting at first, but as you start to get into it, and your understanding improves, I promise you will become more comfortable, and you will be more at peace!

Until next time… Matt Marshall… signing off!

@genxtalkin

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Making A Plan – National Preparedness Month

Hey there all you GenXers. In honor of National Preparedness Month, I wanted to share with you some thoughts on one of the biggest parts of being prepared – Making A Plan…

But first, before I really launch into it, I wanted to start with a special thanks to our listeners and viewers. We’ve hit more than 500 downloads of our podcast in about one month! That’s a pretty incredible feat! And we wouldn’t be here without you, our loyal audience. Thank you and thank you!

For those who haven’t already done so, consider subscribing at:

podcast.genxtalkin.com   

With all that said, onto the blog of the day… It is National Preparedness Month, and that mainly means we focus on two things, making a plan and creating a go bag. We’ve spent some time in a couple of past episodes talking about the different types of bags; edc, go-bag and bug out bags, and the get home safe bag. And for sure we’ll dig deeper into these in future episodes. 

For today we’re focusing on the first half, making a plan. 

I think one of the important concepts around making a plan is first to realize it’s never just one plan at all!  There can be…

  • Fire escape plan – the most popular preparedness-related search on Google
  • Shelter In place plan – Wanna keep it all in the homestead
  • Evacuation route planning – don’t forget the backup routes
  • Water collection plan – Most important survival topic aside from the air we breath
  • Communications plan – How can we talk to each other, and where can we meet
  • Financial plan – got your budget planned out

This I’m sure is one of the reasons it can take a while to make a plan – when you consider… all the plans. 

Before I go into my thoughts on these different plans, I also wanted to share some simple resources for those starting out brand new…

  • Ready.gov – the base link that provides a simplistic, and yet well organized means to start getting organized in preparedness
  • Communications plan – a very detailed plan on how a family can start getting all the communications together (collecting Information, ensure everyone has a copy, and talk about it on regular basis)
  • Family emergency plan – this is part of the Read.gov site, but delves more deeply into preparing for families with kids (younger, as well as older teens).

There are a plethora of sites and videos and podcasts we can all use when making our plan. Many of these sites are so much more informative than these I’ve listed. However, for those first starting out, I recommend this group of sites because it drastically simplifies the process of making a plan and starting out on your preparedness journey. They tend to lean heavily on the government providing solutions to our preparedness problems, but I think that’s because these days, so many people already rely on the government.

Over time, individuals and communities can and should become more self reliant, so they don’t have to rely on the government. That’s part of the reason Ed and I started the podcast, to start building community (virtually), to inform and educate, and even to learn more for ourselves from what others are doing.

Let’s take a look at some of the most basic plans we can make.

Planning to Shelter In Place

For Shelter in place I personally think, and I believe most preparedness-minded people walk this same path, that it’s important to first define what are your greatest threats. If you know what you and your community are most at risk of encountering, then you can more easily prepare to combat them.

In some of our episodes of GenXTalkin – On Being Prepared, we’ve touched briefly on the different types of threat events, but I’d like to clarify these very quickly…

High Impact, High Frequency – traffic jams, reside in or travel through a dangerous area, fires in certain areas, epidemics and disease breakouts, house fires

High Impact, Low Frequency – large weather events, emp, hacking/cyber  attack on fuel pipelines, regional attacks, regional wildfires, loss of source of income

Low Impact, High Frequency – traffic jams, vehicle out of gas, pick pockets or mugging (could be higher impact), ran out of food at home

Low Impact, Low Frequency – heat waves, gas prices risen, minimal storm surge

One helpful way to understand realistic threat events in your area is to use the National Risk Index.

This is primarily for natural hazards, but has some additional factors as well. Click on the link and look for the “Explore the Map” option. This will open an interactive map of the US, allowing users to zoom into their respective county. Select a county of interest, and in a side panel, the following options are available:

  • Risk Index – risk levels relative to the natural hazard threat (hurricane, tornado, volcano…), and compared to other areas of the state and nation.
  • Expected Annual Loss – based upon property values and potential for risk
  • Social Vulnerability – how susceptible is the community to the adverse impacts of natural hazards.
  • Community Resilience – ability for a community to prepare for anticipated natural hazards, adapt to changing conditions, and withstand and recover rapidly from disruptions.

One more important aspect of this Index is one can quickly create a report, similar to this one for Cook Country (Chicago area), which shows these results for your selected county (CAUTION: it may take a while to load in the next tab). This can be a great tool for getting to the main root of what problems may occur for your community. Armed with this information we can get an idea of what itmes we may need to purchase or organize in case the threat event occurs.

Planning to Evacuate or Get Out Quick

The government recommends having a Bugout, or Go Bag in the event you have to get away from home quickly. And most preparedness minded organizations add onto this in saying, within 15 minutes, you should be ready to go with all you need for at least 72 hours, but supplies for one week is even better. Preparing to evacuate can be a scary, and daunting task, and it can take on many forms.

The most popular search on Google, if you look up the keyword preparedness, is related to Fire Safety. So you really should start here. How to prepare self and family in case of fire is very prevalent in the minds of folks in the US. For an individual, it really can be as simple as becoming familiar with escape routes from each room. If you’re at work or school, take a look at the fire escape plan. Just about every building will have one posted in a very public place, because OSHA Standards basically require it for businesses. Know which way you would go if there were a fire alarm, and regularly do a quick review of that path, so you can recognize it, even when you can’t see (due to smoke).

As well, if you travel for work, get in the habit of doing this in hotels, airports and your temporary place of work. Good to at least get a basic idea of layouts.

You will also come to realize that many organizations themselves identify a “Floor Safety Manager”, who is someone very familiar with how to respond in emergencies, and is tasked with regular drills and directing people where to go during those emergencies.

Interesting fact from the September 11, 2001 WTC Attacks. Many lives were saved because a couple of very dedicated safety managers drilled the escape plan so many times over the years. Those safety managers were in the WTC building when the original attack occured in 1993.

– 9/11 – One Day in America

Next, create a fire escape plan at home. This should be two fold. First, ensure everyone knows how to get out of the house very quickly and by multiple pathways. This way if one direction is blocked, they can get out another way without hesitation. It also might be fun one of these days to wake the family up in the middle of the night with very loud music and banging while you’re waving a flashlight around yelling “FIRE! FIRE!, EVERYONE OUT! HURRY!!” ; )

Also consider where your gathering points might be staged. There should be two, one right outside the house (near a tree) and one should be slightly further away, like a neighbor’s front porch. These locations should be clear to anyone visiting as well. Saying something like “gather where the old tire swing used to hang” won’t help visitors understand, whereas “Go to the big tree in the front yard” would work great!

Planning Your Communications

Most important here is understanding how important it is to have proper communications. Without communications, how will we know:

  • where to meet up
  • when to meet up
  • what do we do when the first meet up location fails
  • What are our next steps
  • what direction I’m headed
  • or simply… is my family OK?

Start with the basics for the Communications Plan. First, collect important information such as phone numbers; for each other, for friends and family, for doctors, hospitals, dentists, ob-gyn, etc. Collect information around children’s school (including college), and adult workplace emergency plans. Where will the kids be taken (and how, by bus?) in a time of emergency? Always include out of town contacts to use as go-between during large events, and establish a time to check in at regular intervals.

Adding onto the fire escape plan above, establish meeting places ahead of time for additional purposes.

  • Indoor – in case of extreme weather, such as tornadoes
  • In your neighborhood – like the neighbor’s front porch in case you can’t get into your home
  • Outside your neighborhood – to meet up if you’re not at home during emergencies and cannot cannot get there
  • Outside your own town or city, or even state or region – for cases in which you cannot get home and you’ve been instructed to evacuate the area

Next up is to share the information with the family. This is super important. Make small laminated sheets for each to hold in a wallet, purse or backpack. Having this information handy will allow each family member to respond well and recover faster.

Consider adding a couple of apps to your smartphone. My wife and I belong to a volunteer organization called CERT (Community Emergency Response Team). These are present in most urban and suburban areas in the US. Many of these groups create their own smartphone apps, but they also have directed us to the following:

  • AED – which gives a dynamic map for locations of AED (Automated external defibrillators) units – for helping those suffering from heart attack.
  • PulsePoint – emergency organizations around the country submit their events to this app, providing a service like the old scanners, so you can receive alerts on your phone when different emergencies (utilities, natural disasters, flooding, traffic, etc.) occur in your area.
  • USNG – a way to locate yourself during emergencies. This can be key for emergency services trying to locate you during a disaster,
  • CodeRed – Mobile alert service similar to the PulsePoint service above.
  • 311 – Often local counties will have their own version of an app for reporting issues in your area. This is more for community awareness, not necessarily emergencies
  • ERG2020 – Ever wonder what those different colored diamonds on the back of trucks and shipping containers mean? This is the app to answer those questions. Enter the number on teh diamond, or just browse, and you can see the meaning, potential hazard, what the public should do, and how emergency services should respond if there is an issue with the vehicle.
  • Compass – Oh yeah! although if you’re properly prepared, you probably already have an analog compass in your Emergency Kit… Why not have the Compass app as well on your phone?

II’ll finish up the communications plan section with two points. One of the problems that often occurs during natural disasters is that cell phone services get “clogged”. Basically your phone calls just can’t get through, because the network is overloaded with people just trying to reach their loved ones. So, start with just texting instead. Texts are much smaller packets, and a couple of quick lines of text can deliver the message and free up the network for more emergency-type uses.

Second, while you have the chance, take a look around your area with your smartphone. Try to find additional locations at which you can connect to the internet via WIFI. I’m talking about those free locations, like hotels and coffee shops that offer them up for their customers. If you’re stuck in the city, and you can move about on foot, get to a location that still has WIFI up and running and you can be better informed during the emergency. Of course, you want to make sure this is actually a free service. Very frustrating when you’re in the midst of an emergency, and you have to enter a credit card, or email information to gain access. Also, a good reason to plan this ahead is you also want the ability to recognize the WIFI network you’re using. This would be a prime situation for hackers to try to capture unwitting users’ private information by “sniffing” or monitoring that WIFI network. Whether emergency or not, you never want to transmit your personal data, unprotected by VPN, across an unknown WIFI network!

Lastly, you should come to realize that preparedness does not stop at the end of National Preparedness Month… Keep going, and remember that “practice makes PROGRESS!”

@genxtalkin