Tag Archives: disaster prep

Observations on Hurricane Sandy

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This is sort of stale news, but watching the aftermatch of Hurricane Sandy was a reminder of what would happen in any widespread disaster. I was struck by the lack of standyby power, fuel, food, and heating supplies. It got fairly cold after the storm, lots of people had no heat and had to leave the area to avoid freezing. As I’ve pointed out, heat is electrically operated in most places and would not function without power, even if the natural gas was still on.  Gasoline either ran out or was unavailable from the pumps (no power), so people had trouble getting out. Telecom was mostly inoperative, payphones became a very valuable commodity, and in some cases the only comms left standing.

It points up the need to be standalone self-sufficient for at least a month, to weather something like this. It’s not some abstraction, it’s reality and Sandy was proof of that. These events are fairly common, so it pays to be ready IMO.

Public and government responses to a real emergency, past and future

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So we talked about what constitutes an major emergency, but what would happen afterwards? Frankly, no one really knows.  Let’s list some past events to see what we can glean from them.

Hurricane Katrina

In my  opinion, this was a demonstration of what would happen albeit on a small (city-wide) scale. Highlights:

  • Utter failure of local/city/state/federal responders.  Despite being limited to New Orleans and surrounding areas, it took forever for the Guard and Feds to get into the area and do basic rescue and supply operations.  Police disappeared, creating a lawless city. Keep in mind the rest of the country was not affected.
  • Non-existent/insufficient planning and backup supplies. The evacuation plan was comical, and was not implemented until far too late. Afterwards, there was no coherent plan to follow (just winging it).
  •  Reliance of the populace on “the authorities” to help them. Remember all the people in the dome with no food, water, sanitation, or medical attention?
  • Widespread looting. No cops, open season on stores.

This is the biggest disaster in memory, nothing else comes close in terms of disruption.  Because of the flooding, it was very difficult to get in and out of the city and showed how critical transportation and resupply from unaffected areas is to the crisis.

2009 H1N1 Swine Flu

This was a dress reheasal for contagion. Again, highlights:

  • Slow (excrutiatingly) response from WHO. The outbreak was in full swing in Mexico City before they showed up, and longer until they figured out what was going on.
  • Spread of the virus to the US and other places before any warnings were issued. It wasn’t until a school in NYC was infected and many students got sick did they issue a travel advisory.  By then it had popped up in multiple locations in the US.
  • Indifference to the situation by the public. I was shocked at how little people knew about H1N1 and that they might want to monitor events for their own safety.

SARS was a lot like this, it showed up in Canada before anyone really got the story.

I can’t think of any other really major events, but these have some potential to illustrate the potential response to a larger emergency. Takeaways:

  1. People will be slow to realize the true nature and scope of the emergency.
  2. The authorities may be incapacitated or spread so thin as to be ineffective.
  3. Few concrete and actionable plans, public or private, will exist to deal with said emergency.
  4. Aid and assistance will be delayed or minimal.

Why Day366?

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This blog is intended to be a resource for people who are interested in emergency preparedness, with a focus on long term strategies. The title “Day366” refers to the idea that it’s great to prepare for a year, but what happens on day 366? There’s a lot of discussion and awareness of the subject lately, due to TV shows about preppers and fictional accounts of apocolyptic events. There’s also a lot of misinformation, myths, and plain nonsense about what would happen in various scenarios and how to respond to those events. One of they key aspects of preparedness is planning, but how do you plan if you don’t know what is going to occur? I’ve seen many blogs and individual posts about people stocking up for the Big One, but very little though on what exactly what that is. If you are going to prepare, it makes sense to spend your time and money on the right things. Otherwise you may end up with a false sense of security and be as bad off as doing nothing at all.

I’ve modified my view of preparedness over time, mostly by thinking through the various scenarios and reading other people’s posts. It’s definitely a work in progress, you can’t really ever say “yes I’m good to go”  unless you live in a Swiss mountain bunker with 0% reliance on the outside world. Most of us are stuck with a finite budget, time, and space so it’s even more of a compromise. But hopefully we can make enough of a plan to achieve the end goal getting ourselves and our family through a disaster. That’s what counts.

This is good place to stop the introduction, and move on to the first post.