I’m sure you’ve all been following the devastation in Japan the last few days. The earthquake, ensuing tsunami, evacuations, and nuclear power plant problems are beyond the average disaster. So what can be learned from this super disaster?
Here are a few things I’ve thought of–feel free to add your own in the comments.
1. Some situations you can’t prepare for–like the total sudden destruction of your home as in these pictures: (before/after). Any of those homes could have had a year’s worth of food in them and it wouldn’t help anybody now. Earthquakes come suddenly, Tsunamis usually with very little warning if any. There is not always time to get out or protect yourself or your family. But if you do have a bit of warning, you need to be ready to move out–fast!
2. #1 does not mean preparing is useless! If you happened to be away from home when something like that occurred, some emergency supplies in your car or office would be more than a little helpful in the days following the disaster. Note the people two days later in Japan needing clean water, food, etc. OR if you have important documents, etc. ready to grab at a moment’s notice, you’d save yourself a lot of trouble during recovery time.
3. The time to prepare for an earthquake is before it happens. Look around and see what things could cause damage in your home and get them secured. Don’t hang pictures above the beds in your home that could come off the wall and injure or kill. Take some precautionary measures in your home so it will be safer in the event of a disaster.
4. Take stock of your surroundings–natural and man-made. Do you live on or near a fault line? Near the ocean? On the edge of a river? Down stream from a dam? What are your most likely natural disasters? Then what man-made structures could cause a problem in an emergency? Do you live near nuclear plants, oil refineries, other places that could cause health and safety concerns if they are damaged or compromised? Or places like power plants that might be a potential terror target? Look around, assess your own situation, and act so that your family is as safe as you can make them.
5. Sometimes you get lucky. Like this guy.
6. Help is coming, but slowly. No way are the hardest hit areas going to see relief any time soon. Resources are stretched pretty thin in a major disaster like this one. 72 hour kits are misleading–it could take a week or likely longer for outside help to get to some areas. It usually does.
7. Disease is also coming. Although the cold weather is not great for those left homeless, it might help keep disease down from the bodies long enough to get some of them cleaned up and taken care of. I’m no medical expert here, just a thought I had. Sanitation is huge at this stage to keep the survivors healthy. Clean water will be a big factor here also. We’ll see over the next few weeks how this plays out–hopefully they’ll be able to keep health issues under control.
What I don’t want is to watch all the news coverage in shock and come away no better prepared in our own families. And so I ask, what can we learn? What is one more thing you or I could do to be better prepared? What observations have you made?
Keep preparing! Angela
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Things like this just break my hard AND scare the living daylights out of me. I have 72 hour kits, first aid kits, food storage, cash, etc, but I think ” what if it’s all buried and I can’t use it anyway?” So scary. So sad.
I agree–this is absolutely awful and makes me think, too. I live in an earthquake area and there is some water around us. We’ve got our house about as prepared as possible for an earthquake, but the tsunami/water trouble is a hard one… I recently decided to prepare “emergency vests” as part of our evacuation supplies (an idea I got while reading “Will to Live” that you reviewed). That way we could wear the most important survival tools on our body in case we are separated from each other or our other supplies or truly only have time to grab the kids and a few supplies and get out of there. That might be helpful in a situation like this–especially if you are caught in the water for a bit. At least you’d have a few supplies on hand to help.
It also makes me think about where the closest nuclear reactor is to us and if we should get supplies for making a “safe house”. We’ve done “safe room” preparations to cut plastic sheeting to cover openings in one room for a short-term hazardous emergency, but now I wonder if we shouldn’t have extra supplies on hand to seal our whole house for a longer term emergency. Radiation is scary… Oh, and I thought about researching the iodine tablets that keep your thyroid from storing radiation and if that’s something you can keep on hand.