Cold Weather Emergency Stuff Again

This is an extra post for people who are affected or might be affected by the latest giant storm to hit the USA. I am starting with a link to a weather tracker on CNN and then I'm giving you a link to NOAA the national weather service. 
http://www.cnn.com/2013/02/20/us/severe-weather-tracker/index.html?iid=article_sidebar

Here is the NOAA site: http://www.noaawatch.gov/ They changed how the site works. Just look along the right border for the disaster of your choice and it tells you how that one is doing.

NOAA also has a hurricane tracker, but this giant storm is not a hurricane, so the hurricane watch won't help you if you are in it. If you happen to want to look at hurricanes, there is a link to one near Florida now.

Every time there is a cold weather disaster people die from carbon monoxide poisoning. DO NOT USE AN UNVENTED HEATER INSIDE!!! If that is the only heat you have take it outside away from your doors and windows and heat up bricks and wrap them in towels or blankets to take inside. You can also heat rocks or water to put in a hot water bottle and take those inside.

I already posted repeatedly about making a shelter for sheltering in place if you need to stay home during a power outage. This means you need to stack up a lot of fabric, paper, and cardboard around a small area just a little bigger than the body or bodies to occupy it. In order to get warm in there you need 15 to 18 inches of stuff stacked around you. You need something sturdy to hold up all of this insulating stuff over your head. 

Suggestions I have read are using a chair at either end and then putting a board or broomstick across them. I think a lot of broomsticks might break. It might be better to put at least a couple of them to hold the weight better.

The objective of all the above stacking of insulating material is to trap body heat in there to keep you warm. If you have a pet or pets, it is a good idea to take them in there with you even if you are not worried about them suffering from the cold. Dogs and cats put out a lot of heat. Their body temperature is several degrees higher than normal for humans.
conditions.

Here is a link to emergency supplies check lists from Ready.gov:
http://www.ready.gov/sites/default/files/documents/files/checklist_1.pdf

Here is what the Red Cross has to say about how to tell what is happening in your area: 


Know the Difference
Winter Storm Outlook - Winter storm conditions are possible in the next 2 to 5 days.

Winter Weather Advisory - Winter weather conditions are expected to cause significant inconveniences and may be hazardous. When caution is used, these situations should not be life threatening.

Winter Storm Watch - Winter storm conditions are possible within the next 36 to 48 hours. People in a watch area should review their winter storm plans and stay informed about weather conditions.

Winter Storm Warning - Life-threatening, severe winter conditions have begun or will begin within 24 hours. People in a warning area should take precautions immediately.

The following is the Red Cross' recommended supplies for Cold weather emergencies:

❏ Water—at least a 3-day supply; one gallon

per person per day

❏ Food—at least a 3-day supply of nonperishable, easy-to-prepare food

❏ Flashlight

❏ Battery-powered or hand-crank radio

(NOAA Weather Radio, if possible)

❏ Extra batteries

❏ First aid kit

❏ Medications (7-day supply) and medical

items (hearing aids with extra batteries,

glasses, contact lenses, syringes, cane)

❏ Multi-purpose tool

❏ Sanitation and personal hygiene items

❏ Copies of personal documents

(medication list and pertinent medical

information, proof of address, deed/lease

to home, passports, birth certificates,

insurance policies)

❏ Cell phone with chargers

❏ Family and emergency contact

information

❏ Extra cash

❏ Baby supplies (bottles, formula, baby

food, diapers)

❏ Pet supplies (collar, leash, ID, food,

carrier, bowl)

❏ Tools/supplies for securing your home

❏ Sand, rock salt or non-clumping kitty

litter to make walkways and steps less

slippery

❏ Warm coats, gloves or mittens, hats, boots

and extra blankets and warm clothing for

all household members

❏ Ample alternate heating methods such as

fireplaces or wood- or coal-burning

stoves 

As I already mentioned - do not use those "Ample alternate heating methods such as fireplaces or wood or coal-burning stoves inside unless they are vented. This does not mean to rig up a vent yourself. If this is not safely done by a professional, it can kill you. Carbon monoxide is colorless and odorless and you will never wake up from it."

I have not included the current FEMA  and other government supplies lists for cold weather emergencies because they are pretty useless. I do have their old lists, which are useful, in early posts. They would be in the early part of 2012 or the last 3 months of 2011. 

Look at the basic emergency supplies checklists and then compare them to the Red Cross cold weather emergency supplies checklist.

If you are freezing your fanny off right now and can't get to the store or the store has already had all the shelves emptied, please stack up your stuff to insulate yourself and scrounge for whatever you can eat in your home. 

I hope you will put cold weather emergency supplies on your shopping list wherever you live. Mother Nature has gone whacko because of climate change and we no longer can depend on what the weather will do. Be sure to look at my posts about the climate change movement. There are petitions you can sign there to ask Obama to work on climate change. You might be noticing we need that.

One Size Does Not Fit All In Emergency Preparedness

You may be tired of seeing me post over and over about how people need to choose their own disaster supplies to work for their individual and family needs. I'm telling you again.

If you or a family member have allergies or other health problems, the medications and equipment for those health problems need to be part of your disaster preparedness supplies. They even need to be in your Go Bag or Go Bags.

If you have an infant in the family, you need supplies in your Go Bags to take care of your infant, including diapers, changes of clothes and formula.

If you have pets to evacuate, you need the supplies for them packed in their Go Bags. I have posts up about the items needed for Go Bags for pets. One of these is papers with proof of vaccination, spaying or neutering and a photo with you and your pet together. These may all be required to be able to put your pet in a shelter.

The standard procedure in a large urban area in the USA, pets will be housed in a shelter for pets that is close to another shelter for humans who belong to those pets. Pets cannot be housed in the same shelter as their people. You may very likely be required to care for your pet in the shelter, including feeding them, so being nearby is essential. This is one of the announcements you want to be alert for - where are these paired shelters for pets and humans located?

There will often be special requirements of emergency supplies for elderly family members. Emergency Supplies lists from different disaster relief agencies will include suggestions for these family members.

If you have a family member in a wheel chair, special arrangements for evacuation may need to be made for them. In my city, for example, the paratransit system will use a database on file with the city Emergency Operations Center to evacuate people who need help, such as people who must use wheel chairs. 

You need to be aware of what the plans for evacuation in your city are. If it is like mine, you need to put your family member who uses a wheel chair in this database. If you do not already know this information, you can contact your Emergency Operations Center, or local Fire Department to find out.

There are already posts on this blog about entertainment for you and your family during and after a disaster. You can only stay excited so long, before boredom sets in. 

I have posts up on sites that tell you how to make your own games to use during and after an emergency. If you make your own games, maybe you can get a better radio or more food. 

Games are something that your family might be more willing than usual to test ahead of time. You can pick the favorites to put in your Go Bags.

This is not an exhaustive list of differences between individuals or families to allow for when doing Emergency Preparedness. I do hope that you will use it as a starting place and keep going.

Organizing Is Preparedness

Preparedness is not necessarily that useful unless you are somewhat organized about it. You need the can opener along with the cans. The Go Bag needs to be packed and ready to grab quickly on your way out the door to evacuate.

You need to have some level of planning and organizing to really be prepared. I have already posted several times with sites that offer lists of preparedness supplies. 

If you are just starting out with Emergency Preparedness, the first thing you need is a Go Bag. This should contain supplies to keep you going for up to three days as well as important papers. I have links in previous posts to the Red Cross lists for preparedness supplies along with the same for FEMA and other disaster relief organizations.

Every individual and family is different. Your exact needs will be different than the needs of other individuals and families. It is a good idea to look at suggested disaster supplies lists from different organizations, so you can pick out what supplies best fit your needs.

One way to help choose what kinds of disaster supplies to emphasize is to examine the most likely disasters for your area.

Do you live in or near an area that has frequent tornadoes? Are you in an area that has or expects earthquakes? Are you on the route for radioactive materials being trucked to a disposal site? You can check on what sorts of disasters are most likely to happen in your area.

Once you select the most likely disasters that you must deal with, you can then look at recommendations for supplies to have on hand for those disasters. 

Many disaster essentials for one kind of emergency will be the same ones needed for most other kinds of disasters. There will be only a relatively small amount of supplies that are unique to a certain kind of disaster. This makes disaster preparedness much easier. 

Look at the lists of supplies for the different kinds of disasters most likely to occur in your area. You can begin your preparedness with the items that are on all the lists for different kinds of disasters that are likely in your area.

Preparedness requires some practice. In order to get the bugs out of your plan, you will need to actually try out at least parts of it. An example of this is your evacuation plan. 

If the building you live in is two stories high, you need to make sure everyone who will be using that rope ladder to evacuate, can actually use it. Finding out that Grandma is too weak to hold onto the ladder is not something you want to find out in the middle of a fire. You need to know if you have to work out plan B. 

When I first began to actively work at preparedness, I lived on the third floor of a building. I found to my chagrin, that rope ladders for higher than two stories are not commonly stocked in most stores that carry preparedness supplies. You have to look around for them.

I was thinking about looking for a fire escape ladder when I watched a video of a disaster in Asia with a fire in a tall building. There were only a few very long rope ladders to escape from the building. The ladders were full of people.  I didn't have to do any math at all to see that the ladders were clearly overloaded. There were not enough of the ladders, even overloaded as they were. People were jumping off the ladders to their deaths.

Those buildings should have had many more fire escape ladders than they had. People died because there were not enough ladders. That is not a difficult preparedness thing to organize. Make sure you have enough fire ladders that are long enough for your building.

I just hate seeing people die for no good reason. I hope you, Dear Reader, will not be one of them.

Middle East 101 For Preppers

Part of your preparedness is finding out information that affects your survival as soon as possible. Just as you can handle an emergency better if you keep tabs on storms headed your way, you will do better preparedness if you keep track of civil and political storms in the Middle East. 

Most people need fuel for their daily lives and a lot of the world's supply of fuel comes from the Middle East, or not. If there is a big enough disturbance in the Middle East, there can be an immediate fuel crisis.

War in the Middle East has a way of spreading and dragging other countries clear across the world into it, as peacekeepers, if not doing the fighting.

It is very difficult to figure out what is going on in the Middle East unless you know some basics about Islamic people and countries. I am not an expert on Islamic people and countries, but I took a class on this and have been interested and learning about it since. Therefore I know something about it, which practically makes me an expert compared to the average person. :-P

There are two main sects in the Muslim religion. They are Sunnis and Shiites. Shiites tend to be more fundamentalist than Sunnis most of the time. This means Shiites usually like a stricter, more literal interpretation of the Koran than most Sunnis. 

Sunnis are often more tolerant of people who have different religions. There is a part of the Koran (Islamic Holy Book), that says that other "people of the Book" are ok and their beliefs are acceptable to Gd and Muslims. This is usually interpreted as two "Books", the Christian Bible, and the Jewish Torah. Tolerant Muslims even consider it acceptable to marry other people of the Book. 

You may not be considered to be people of the Book if you belong to the religions, or churches that believe in the Bible or Torah and do not practice your religion. If you are not people of the Book, that can mean to some Muslim fundamentalists that they have a duty to kill you or convert you. Most Muslims are not that extreme, however.

There is another Islamic sect that is fairly numerous and well known. They are called Sufis. They are Muslim mystics. They dance as a form of worship and meditation is an important part of their religious practice. They are generally accepted by both Shiites and Sunnis. Shiites and Sunnis are sometimes not on good terms with each other, and occasionally fight each other. This most often happens when the members of the ruling class belong to Sunnis and most of the general populace is Shiite or vice versa.

There are various smaller factions within Shiites and Sunnis who may have quite different beliefs from the general ones in their Islamic sect. One of these is Salufis. The rulers of Saudi Arabia and Osama Bin Laden and many of the early El Quaeda members were Salufis.

Salufis are more conservative than most Sunnis. Some of the people who took action on their feeling of offense by the video demeaning Mohammed were Salufis. Here is a link explaining more about Salifis:

http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Middle-East/2011/0510/Salafis-101-5-key-facts/Do-Salafis-support-violent-jihad

One major difference between Muslims and Christians is how much agreement there is between members. A room full of Christians could have a hard time agreeing on much of anything. It would be different with a room full of Muslims. 

One of the things that a room full of Muslims would agree on is what happens if their religion or one of its important parts is insulted. This comparative unanimity can be very bad for someone who does the insulting, or anyone connected to them.

This comparative shared Muslim agreement can make it hard for an average Muslim to understand why if one Christian insults them or their religion, that all other Christians were not involved. This can also be true for someone from one country who insults them. A lot of Muslims do not get it that all Americans did not insult their religion, or intend to do that, even though one American dweeb insulted them. 

Misunderstandings like that can get people killed and even start wars. Now that we have a misunderstanding going between many Muslims and Americans, you might want to work a little harder on your emergency preparedness. That would apply whether you are Muslim, American, or work in an Embassy.

Surviving Different Kinds Of Disasters

Some of my posts talk about different kinds of disasters and how to prepare for them. There are a lot of similarities in the preparations that you need to make to survive different kinds of disasters. Volcanic ash fall will have a few differences from preparedness for a tornado, however.


You need to know what kinds of specific disasters are likely to happen where you are. We all need to prepare for disasters in general and we need to prepare for the specific disasters that happen in our area.


I already posted about most types of disasters in earlier posts. I provided links to agencies that cover specific disasters in great depth. They have everything you need to know about the kinds of disasters that your area gets most often.


I will do post links again to agencies that cover all the specific kinds of disasters like hurricanes and mudslides, and what you need to do to be prepared for them. I do not plan to write entire posts again about most specific kinds of disasters. I will see about making it easier for you to find my earlier posts, though.  


I will do new posts about earthquakes. New information has been made available that changes what is considered best to help you survive an earthquake. 


I hope you will study the sites that tell you more about what you need to do to prepare to survive the disasters in your area. Everyone needs to prepare for nuclear disasters, no matter where you live.


Here is a link to the Red Cross for basic family preparedness. You can see more information on the site.


http://www.redcross.org/portal/site/en/menuitem.d8aaecf214c576bf971e4cfe43181aa0/?vgnextoid=72c51a53f1c37110VgnVCM1000003481a10aRCRD&vgnextfmt=default


Here is Red Cross Information about earthquakes:
http://www.redcross.org/portal/site/en/menuitem.53fabf6cc033f17a2b1ecfbf43181aa0/?vgnextoid=6f461c99b5ccb110VgnVCM10000089f0870aRCRD&currPage=13cbb969ae282210VgnVCM10000089f0870aRCRD

If you look along the left side of this page you will see a list of links to pages about different kinds of disasters. 


Find and study all of the kinds of disasters that are likely to happen in your area. Most of them probably have links to PDFs about how to prepare for that type of disaster. You might want to print out those PDFs or at least take notes.

Here is a link to a PDF of an earthquake safety checklist by the Red Cross:
http://www.redcross.org/www-files/Documents/pdf/Preparedness/checklists/Earthquake.pdf
There is some controversy about earthquake safety. It is about the idea of the "triangle of life", an idea that has been discredited in the USA. Drop, cover and hold on has the numbers of expert supporters. I am going with, "drop, cover and hold on". Here is a link to a site that tells about this. http://www.earthquakesolutions.com/id44.html

Here is a link to a Red Cross page that tells you how to prepare for a chemical or radiation disaster. I think you need to know a lot more than this, but it is a place to start. 


My earlier posts include a link to an entire book that you can download for free that tells you in great detail how to prepare for a nuclear disaster. There is also a link to a site that tells you how to make a "computer" out of paper, cardboard and plastic to calculate the effects of a nuclear blast. This blog has a post with a diagram I made of really basic stuff about what happens in a nuclear blast on this blog. 


There are a whole lot of posts on this blog about nukes and nuclear disaster preparedness for you and your family. This is stuff you need to know. I hope you use it so that you can be safer.

You Can Prepare For Disasters

There is not so much need to worry about what will happen in a disaster if you plan for what you will do and prepare for it. It is not a really difficult thing to do if you find out what you will need and break down what you need to have and do to get ready.


There are several government agencies and nonprofits that have information available to the public about what to do in a disaster. I will provide links to some of them in this blog post.


There are two main ways to deal with a disaster. One is to evacuate to a safer place, perhaps a shelter that has been set up for people who have been evacuated. The other is to stay put and "shelter in place". If local authorities tell you that it is necessary to evacuate, you need to pay attention to them and evacuate. People who do not do this often end up dead. If you are told that it is ok to stay put and take shelter in your home, then you can shelter in place.


I believe the most important thing for you to have when a disaster happens is information. You need to know that the disaster has happened, what kind of disaster it is and whether the local authorities want you to evacuate. If you need to evacuate, you need to know where your shelter will be and safe ways to get to it. The emergency alert system tests that stop your radio and TV programs are to make sure the system works right in a disaster. The regular stations will stop normal broadcasting during an emergency alert and tell you where to tune in to find out what you need to know about the emergency.


There are many kinds of disasters and it can be overwhelming if you think you have to prepare for all of them at once. Relax, you do not need to do everything at once. There are certain things you will need in almost any disaster that are the same. Once you look at lists of disaster preparedness items you will see that once you are ready for one kind of disaster, you will be mostly ready for most other types of disasters.


The lists on the sites I am giving you links to are very comprehensive. They are meant to cover what many different people and families might need. Every person and every family is different. You and your family will probably not need everything on the list. You can start with what you think is most important. and work your way down to the less important and things you may not need at all.

If your time and budget are limited, you can prepare just a little bit at a time. You can start with being prepared for a disaster that lasts only a few hours and work your way toward longer term ones.  One meal at a time for you and your family to be able to eat during a disaster is ok as a starting place. Next you can prepare for a whole day and then three days, and so on.


I would like to suggest that you prepare a "go bag" first. This is a package that you can easily carry, backpacks are good, in case you are in a disaster where you have to evacuate. The sites I will give you links to will have lists of suggested items for go bags. There may be items not listed that you will want in your go bag and the go bags for your family. Again, go bags are as different as the people who make them. You will probably not need everything on the go bag list.


Here are some sites with information about preparing for disasters and lists of suggested items for preparedness for go bags and sheltering in place:


This link to FEMA explains about Go Bags


This is FEMAs list of basic supplies.


PDF short basic list of supplies


This link has FEMAs ideas for making your disaster plan.


FEMAs ideas for plans depending on where you are when a disaster happens.


FEMAs in depth guide to preparedness


The list of preparedness supplies starts on page 31 in the last link. You will probably not want to start right off with FEMAs in depth guide to preparedness, because it is very long and has a lot of information to digest, but you can copy it and maybe print it out so you can get ready to read it later. Don't postpone this indefinitely, though. Most of us like to procrastinate and that can be fatal. This needs to be a priority for everyone. You could die if you are not ready to evacuate and have to run around grabbing things and looking for them at the last minute. Avoid that by being prepared.


I am going to do another post, or several, on other disaster preparedness sites because this one is getting too long. I want to make this easy to read for people who are not used to preparedness.