Saturday, September 22, 2007

Disaster preparedness: A new approach

They're telling us out here in California that we need an "earthquake kit". Err, okay. I have three gallons of water in the Jeep as well as an axe, chain, and hi-lift (can be used as a poor man's winch), and a couple boxes of MRE's up here in the apartment. But wait. If there's an earth quake, I'm in a multi-floor apartment building and it's likely to at least collapse to the point where it's hard to get any supplies out of my apartment. And, uhm, my water probably has gotten stale. And I need to eat up these MRE's and get some fresher ones, they're getting old too. And while I have several well-stocked first aid kits ranging from the tiny one in my day pack to the mid-sized one in my Jeep to the big one in my linen closet, I have to keep going through them and discarding the expired medicines and replacing them with fresh ones.

While considering all this, I suddenly had a brilliant idea. How about we as a community get together, put a bunch of money into a kitty, and put together a collective set of trained disaster responders and resources in order to keep ourselves alive in the aftermath of a disaster? That way we don't all individually need to stockpile food and water and medical supplies and so forth, we would already have our community stockpiles maintained and available for use and rotated in a timely manner so that they're never stale, all for much less than we'd individually pay to do so because it's cheaper to buy in bulk. The only problem is what do we call this hypothetical organization that we get together and form in order to help us prepare for emergencies and disasters. I could propose the name "government", but that name is apparently already taken by some sort of alien imposition upon the populace that lives only to steal all our money at gunpoint and provide no services in return.

- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

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2 comments:

  1. pygalgia23/9/07 7:41 AM

    Yeah, it would be nice if we had a working government. Out here, we've loosely organized an emergency response group comprised of whitewater rafters and other outdoor enthusiasts. We figure that since we've already got the gear to support long trips into the wilderness, and the skill set to survive without civilization, we're qualified to respond to an emergency. Ain't much, but it's what we've got.

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  2. Anonymous23/9/07 11:22 AM

    I don't doubt for a second that the people who live along the Gulf coast have all kinds of emergency supplies, and the news coverage before the arrival of a hurricane shows them topping off the supplies at the last minute.

    Which is really meaningful when a twenty-foot wall of salt water takes away your house and car along with the supplies.

    You do sort of wonder if the people who make these commercials have ever been in a disaster.

    I don't know, Pygalgia, we had a lot of people in Louisiana try to get into New Orleans with Jon boasts to rescue people, as well as more than a dozen airboat owners in from Florida, and they got turned away by the Feds.

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