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dr_pretentiousOne of the blessings I'm most thankful for is an ability to learn from other people's misfortunes. It sounds common and obvious, but how many people do you know who have trouble learning even from their own misfortunes? I can't take credit for it--as ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
matociquala might say, it came in the box. Probably it's the adaptive side of the neuroticism. What if? And then when what if happens to me, I've already dragged myself through imagining how to handle it.
Remember that weird wind storm that hit DC in late June? The one with the name nobody on the East Coast had ever heard--the derecho. It knocked a million people off the grid for about a week. I've got a lot of family down there. One of them had to pack out in the dark to get her two young children and ailing mother out of the 104 degree heat wave before the rush of fellow blackout refugees hit the interstates. Another, age 80, ended up hospitalized for pneumonia after he tried to shelter in place. They were all sort of prepared, for some kinds of emergencies. They're smart, resourceful people, and all of them got through okay. The experiences they had kind of sucked, though, and sometimes in avoidable ways. Every time I called to check on how they were doing, I thought to myself, My household is not ready for hurricane season. What will I do with my two tiny kids if Jersey gets another storm as big as Irene?
As big as Irene. Well.
After the derecho, Barnes & Noble had its topical display of disaster preparedness books by the cafe--the cafe where my children aren't, where I don't have to clean anything, and therefore where I get a bit of writing done at the end of a typical teaching night. I bought a few survival manuals, read them, and implemented some of their suggestions. That handful of changes in household inventory and habit has made it possible for us to shelter in place in relative comfort and good spirits through Hurricane Sandy and its aftermath so far.
The most important of the books was Kathy Harrison's Just in Case: How to Be Self-Sufficient When the Unexpected Happens". As most disaster preparedness gurus seem to be, she's slightly nutty, and quite open and cheerful about it. She aims to have a year's supply of food and water on hand in her house, and her descriptions of what she's done to approach that goal are wryly funny. Her voice is friendly and neighborly while she explains how to protect your children from things like chemical warfare. Though a few passages and chapters seem a tad over the top to me, her general readiness recommendations for what to assemble, how to organize and acquire it, and how to rotate the perishable bits, have saved my ass. Her suggestions about how to pace yourself through the acquisition to avoid financial shock were immensely helpful, too. We went into the storm with a five-day supply of drinking water, and a four day supply of just about everything else we really needed. Only now that the stores in our area have their supply chains working again are we starting to run out of stuff.
It helps that our house is on high ground, nowhere near any major bodies of water. It also helps that Dan gets a kick out of lopping questionable limbs off the trees in our yard with his 16-foot pruning saw, so none of our trees caught enough wind to damage anything. Sheltering in place actually made sense for us. If we'd lived somewhere more flood-prone or with bigger trees, we'd have gotten more use out of the next book on my list.
Creek Stewart's Build the Perfect Bug-Out Bag: Your 72-Hour Disaster Survival Kit balances the universal needs (water, shelter, food) with regionally specific needs (clothing for Arizona, clothing for Maine), and special cases (evacuating with children, elders, pets, wheelchair-bound people, etc.). He's a relatively practical survivalist: as far as I can tell, he has actually tested every item he recommends, and he won't tell you to do something dumb like flee to the nearest state forest to starve indefinitely in a cold tent among hundreds of thousands of your new heavily armed friends. (There are books that suggest you do that kind of thing. I didn't buy any of those.) I assembled emergency packs bit by bit, starting by organizing the camping gear Dan and I used to use before the kids. Weeks before Sandy came around, I had everything I could possibly need--and far more than I actually ended up needing--in three big bags near the front door.
Had I lived in Sea Bright, or had a tree fallen through my roof, I can only imagine what a difference that could have made. With our much smaller share of misfortune, I was plenty glad enough to be able to find all my backup light sources in the dark when the electricity went out and the kids started to panic. Within one minute we had headlamps, hand-cranked flashlights, an LED lantern, and glowsticks. And that's what we used for the next four days.
One reason I knew I needed to read Creek Stewart's book is that I'd read a bunch of Jim MacDonald's emergency preparedness posts on the magnificent blog Making Light, and particularly remembered this one about what to pack for an evacuation.
I also owe some thanks to The Prepper's Pocket Guide: 101 Easy Things You Can Do to Ready Your Home for a Disaster, by Bernie Carr. Carr digresses to get to his 101 things, which is odd, because he could just have broken down some of his large items into sub-sections and reached the same arbitrary number with a more focused book. That said, he puts readiness for financial disaster right at the beginning, to dissuade his readers from running out and spending all of their emergency savings on emergency gear at once (and you know some people would). He also emphasizes that the first thing to do to ready your house for an emergency is to declutter, because it doesn't matter what you have if you can't find it. Though the book has some shortcomings, I do plan to reread it now that I have a real disaster fresh in mind.
While I'm on the subject of who and what saved our bacon, I should also mention my awesome neighbors across the street. Their home generator gave everyone on the block a warm place to go for coffee. They took in my family's tankful of tropical fish when we realized the lack of a working filter, heater, and bubbler was about to get dire. They never lost internet, so I was able to make my weekly Black Gate blog post on time. Before the storm, there were a lot of different election yard signs in a lot of different yards. During and after the storm, there was just kindness and cooperation. There were places, other places, in New Jersey where people rioted over gasoline, or looted, or shoved one another to buy the last pack of batteries. I hesitate to judge people in those situations, because I've been spared all that this time. But when you've had enough of the gloomy headlines, please allow yourself to picture this: a living room packed with people drinking sparkling cider toasts to their hosts, voices raised only so their thanks can be heard over the rumble of the generator.
matociquala might say, it came in the box. Probably it's the adaptive side of the neuroticism. What if? And then when what if happens to me, I've already dragged myself through imagining how to handle it.Remember that weird wind storm that hit DC in late June? The one with the name nobody on the East Coast had ever heard--the derecho. It knocked a million people off the grid for about a week. I've got a lot of family down there. One of them had to pack out in the dark to get her two young children and ailing mother out of the 104 degree heat wave before the rush of fellow blackout refugees hit the interstates. Another, age 80, ended up hospitalized for pneumonia after he tried to shelter in place. They were all sort of prepared, for some kinds of emergencies. They're smart, resourceful people, and all of them got through okay. The experiences they had kind of sucked, though, and sometimes in avoidable ways. Every time I called to check on how they were doing, I thought to myself, My household is not ready for hurricane season. What will I do with my two tiny kids if Jersey gets another storm as big as Irene?
As big as Irene. Well.
After the derecho, Barnes & Noble had its topical display of disaster preparedness books by the cafe--the cafe where my children aren't, where I don't have to clean anything, and therefore where I get a bit of writing done at the end of a typical teaching night. I bought a few survival manuals, read them, and implemented some of their suggestions. That handful of changes in household inventory and habit has made it possible for us to shelter in place in relative comfort and good spirits through Hurricane Sandy and its aftermath so far.
The most important of the books was Kathy Harrison's Just in Case: How to Be Self-Sufficient When the Unexpected Happens". As most disaster preparedness gurus seem to be, she's slightly nutty, and quite open and cheerful about it. She aims to have a year's supply of food and water on hand in her house, and her descriptions of what she's done to approach that goal are wryly funny. Her voice is friendly and neighborly while she explains how to protect your children from things like chemical warfare. Though a few passages and chapters seem a tad over the top to me, her general readiness recommendations for what to assemble, how to organize and acquire it, and how to rotate the perishable bits, have saved my ass. Her suggestions about how to pace yourself through the acquisition to avoid financial shock were immensely helpful, too. We went into the storm with a five-day supply of drinking water, and a four day supply of just about everything else we really needed. Only now that the stores in our area have their supply chains working again are we starting to run out of stuff.
It helps that our house is on high ground, nowhere near any major bodies of water. It also helps that Dan gets a kick out of lopping questionable limbs off the trees in our yard with his 16-foot pruning saw, so none of our trees caught enough wind to damage anything. Sheltering in place actually made sense for us. If we'd lived somewhere more flood-prone or with bigger trees, we'd have gotten more use out of the next book on my list.
Creek Stewart's Build the Perfect Bug-Out Bag: Your 72-Hour Disaster Survival Kit balances the universal needs (water, shelter, food) with regionally specific needs (clothing for Arizona, clothing for Maine), and special cases (evacuating with children, elders, pets, wheelchair-bound people, etc.). He's a relatively practical survivalist: as far as I can tell, he has actually tested every item he recommends, and he won't tell you to do something dumb like flee to the nearest state forest to starve indefinitely in a cold tent among hundreds of thousands of your new heavily armed friends. (There are books that suggest you do that kind of thing. I didn't buy any of those.) I assembled emergency packs bit by bit, starting by organizing the camping gear Dan and I used to use before the kids. Weeks before Sandy came around, I had everything I could possibly need--and far more than I actually ended up needing--in three big bags near the front door.
Had I lived in Sea Bright, or had a tree fallen through my roof, I can only imagine what a difference that could have made. With our much smaller share of misfortune, I was plenty glad enough to be able to find all my backup light sources in the dark when the electricity went out and the kids started to panic. Within one minute we had headlamps, hand-cranked flashlights, an LED lantern, and glowsticks. And that's what we used for the next four days.
One reason I knew I needed to read Creek Stewart's book is that I'd read a bunch of Jim MacDonald's emergency preparedness posts on the magnificent blog Making Light, and particularly remembered this one about what to pack for an evacuation.
I also owe some thanks to The Prepper's Pocket Guide: 101 Easy Things You Can Do to Ready Your Home for a Disaster, by Bernie Carr. Carr digresses to get to his 101 things, which is odd, because he could just have broken down some of his large items into sub-sections and reached the same arbitrary number with a more focused book. That said, he puts readiness for financial disaster right at the beginning, to dissuade his readers from running out and spending all of their emergency savings on emergency gear at once (and you know some people would). He also emphasizes that the first thing to do to ready your house for an emergency is to declutter, because it doesn't matter what you have if you can't find it. Though the book has some shortcomings, I do plan to reread it now that I have a real disaster fresh in mind.
While I'm on the subject of who and what saved our bacon, I should also mention my awesome neighbors across the street. Their home generator gave everyone on the block a warm place to go for coffee. They took in my family's tankful of tropical fish when we realized the lack of a working filter, heater, and bubbler was about to get dire. They never lost internet, so I was able to make my weekly Black Gate blog post on time. Before the storm, there were a lot of different election yard signs in a lot of different yards. During and after the storm, there was just kindness and cooperation. There were places, other places, in New Jersey where people rioted over gasoline, or looted, or shoved one another to buy the last pack of batteries. I hesitate to judge people in those situations, because I've been spared all that this time. But when you've had enough of the gloomy headlines, please allow yourself to picture this: a living room packed with people drinking sparkling cider toasts to their hosts, voices raised only so their thanks can be heard over the rumble of the generator.
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no subject
Date: 2012-11-05 04:35 am (UTC)Also, re: your across the street neighbors -- would they be the electrician and family who built and moved in there a few years ago? :)
no subject
Date: 2012-11-05 04:41 am (UTC)Oh, and since you're here, I've been meaning to ask you if you still have, and don't now need, the bar code scanner you used to enter your books into LibraryThing. As you predicted, I find that typing in ISBN codes is beginning to feel a little slow.
no subject
Date: 2012-11-05 08:26 pm (UTC)I never actually bought a bar code scanner; by the time I realized it was foolish not to have done so I'd already entered about 3/4 of my books. I hope you decide to go ahead an invest in one before you get further into your collection.
no subject
Date: 2012-11-05 06:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-11-05 06:50 am (UTC)Out here, there's only one disaster we really need to prep for - an earthquake. Well, and a terrorist attack, but I think we'd get about the same warning for one as the other (none). The great thing about years of going to Burning Man is that we have just about all those emergency supplies - the issue is that half of it is still packed with our Burning Man gear. We could find it, but not real quickly. Your post makes me think that we should start keeping our headlamps in our night tables, at the very least.
I do have four suitcases of water and enough shelf-stable food for four days sitting in our closet. I have not really considered a bug-out bag but I guess it's time to assemble one.
no subject
Date: 2012-11-07 02:56 am (UTC)Four suitcases of water is very impressive. I haven't quite worked my way up to that, and I have more people to hydrate.
no subject
Date: 2012-11-25 05:37 am (UTC)The suitcases of water started out as early Burning Man prep, but when we had to cancel this year they turned into Earthquake Preparedness Kit.
no subject
Date: 2012-11-05 09:28 am (UTC)There's been a deal of scaremongering on teh intarwebz, though it's good to see it counteracted by stories like yours of neighbours looking after one another.
When Katrina hit, I read up on emergency prep, and promptly did nothing. After all, it seemed like the sort of thing that might happen in a place I'd live in, but...
Now I find myself thinking more about this stuff. Because Sandy hit people I actually know? Because the weather's been so wet here this year that even small snowfall and rain now could trigger flooding across swathes of the UK? Because we now own our own house and have actually had work done and are planning more for next year, and the year after? I don't know. I do know that go-bags in the wardrobe and either loft space or a small shed with non-perishables sounds a lot more doable and likely to happen than before. And because of my reliance on light therapy, solar and wind-up rechargers seem more urgent.
no subject
Date: 2012-11-07 02:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-11-05 02:15 pm (UTC)I was deeply grateful that my family have long been campers. Even though the Coleman stove is a dinosaur of camp stoves, it worked just fine and there were plenty of propane canisters for it, along with the kerosene lantern. Multiple meals were cooked out on the picnic table on the patio. None of the few remaining awkward branches came down, so we were lucky. The LED lantern enabled my grandmother to read at night, even with her failing eyesight, due to it's brightness so she could stay awake to her usual night owl hours even though there was no TV. Sadly, the old transistor radio must have quietly died between Irene and Sandy, because it didn't work, even with brand new batteries.
We were not as prepared in the battery department as we should have been, and I also learned that in addition to batteries, the older flashlights also need spare lightbulbs... =/
I'll have to look up some of those books, especially the bits about how to evacuate with an elderly person.
Hang in there and keep up the wonderful writing!
no subject
Date: 2012-11-07 03:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-11-05 11:53 pm (UTC)Great reviews! I wish I were better at writing book reviews & in general thinking about how to evaluate and report on my experience with a book. Your insights are much appreciated!
no subject
Date: 2012-11-07 09:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-11-06 05:07 am (UTC)Had to break out earplugs and put iPod headphones over the top of the earplugs to get any sleep. :-/
The person who invents a quiet home generator will make a freakin' FORTUNE.
no subject
Date: 2012-11-07 01:49 pm (UTC)One of our neighbors from down the street ran his noisy, cheap generator 24 hours a day and it was annoying. Our cool neighbor had the Honda generator, ran it for an hour or so per house 2 times a day, and it was quieter standing right next to it than the one from several houses away.
no subject
Date: 2012-11-07 09:30 pm (UTC)