I had an interesting conversation with one of my grandchildren this morning, my wife read us an article about disasters. The North Korean nuclear bomb threat in particular, the article stated that we should all have at least a 14-day supply of emergency supplies on hand. I asked my grandson what he thought of all this and if he had ever thought about situations where he would have to fend for himself. The scenario I asked you about is a very real situation for people living in an earthquake country. (I must say that I am not in the least worried about a North Korean nuclear attack, all I will say is that it is all bragging and exaggeration.) However, living 50 miles from San Francisco in the Great Delta of California, the possibility of a major earthquake is very real. I asked him if he was in town and there was a big earthquake that knocked out all the public services, what would he do. He told me that he would leave town immediately, OK, I guess that was my response. The second question I had was where would he go, and of course he said our house, which is perfectly fine with us. So I asked him how he would get out of the city, he answered me by bus, train, car, walking and so on, I told him that there would be many people with the same idea. There are 3 ways to get out of San Francisco, 1) The Bay Bridge. 2) The Golden Gate Bridge 3) The 101 freeway through south San Francisco. Overcrowded on a normal business day, during an emergency evacuation it would become an impossible situation in my opinion. In my opinion, the first thousand vehicles could go out, then with breakdowns and accidents the roads would quickly fill up. Then he told me he was leaving, I just asked him “where? Oakland? Hayward? In other words no one is going anywhere after the ‘big one’ happens in my opinion, we’ve been told that over and over again. again it will happen We ended the talk with no solution other than a better understanding of what can happen, grandkids sometimes take the train into town for a day so it was a worthwhile conversation (they are all in their 20s Although we didn’t come to a conclusive decision on our discussion, it did raise a more relevant question: “If a major disaster happened and you were home, what would you grab on the way out?”

I’m thinking of a wildfire, home fire, flood, earthquake, or any other situation that takes out all of our utilities. 4-1/2 years ago my neighbors house burned to the ground in the middle of the night. Houses on either side were damaged by fire, with one being 80% destroyed and although it was never rebuilt, it remains burned to this day. helmet. If the prevailing wind had been blowing (it wasn’t) and if it was dry (thankfully it was torrential rain), my house would most likely have gone up in flames as well. It is an unsettling sight to see the neighbors, very good neighbors, running around in their night clothes with garden hoses trying to save their houses. It was an extremely dangerous situation, a neighbor was in her nightgown and flip flops 30 feet from the house fully involved, she was next to a large pine tree. I could see the tree burst into flames possibly seriously injuring her, it didn’t happen but the tree was destroyed by the heat. The fact is that the week before I saw her spraying the tree with her garden hose, of course I asked her what it was about. She replied that she has an allergy and that that pine tree was full of pollen, she has an allergy to that tree and they were thinking of removing it. The tree was soaked that night and probably saved her from serious injury or worse. After the fire department arrived (we are in a very rural area in the middle of nowhere so response usually takes at least 20 minutes), I realized we had no emergency supplies, the neighbors who responded they had their night clothes and nothing else. I started thinking about preparation and the question I asked myself was, “If that was me, what would I grab to go out?” So I began to form the basis of my emergency disaster plan and what I would need to put together for a home emergency preparedness kit. That event inspired me to create a website dedicated to helping people become as self-sufficient as possible. So I came up with the following list:

1) Get up and get dressed, keep a set of clothes next to the bed, shoes, pants and a shirt.

2) Getting my 95 year old mother-in-law out of the bed, assigned to either my wife or me.

3) Find my emergency backpack that contains my laptop and all the information from my website, if I lose it it could be a disaster.

4) Put away my wheelchair, it’s ok take it out if I can, if there’s a fire upstairs I’ll lose both of my mobile devices.

5) Grab my ukulele, guitars and banjo

6) The tower computer above, only the tower

7) Throw all these things in the elevator and then

8) Get my big mobility scooter out of there, I put it on the back porch by the door.

9) Oh the crazy dog, good grievance that will be a challenge

10) All the car keys!

That’s not even the full list! After I put it in writing, reality slapped me in the face, like a B-movie western, “what the hell am I thinking?” If I were to take all those things, in fact, if I could gather them all in a short time, it would be a major task. By my estimation, after watching videos of fires made by various fire departments, I have come to the conclusion that I have one minute to evacuate. It came to me a minute after watching a video of a Christmas tree made by a fire department. A small building was built with a replica of the living room containing a Christmas tree, a sofa, a chair and a small table. The string of lights was defective, after the lights were turned on, it immediately began to smoke, then the wiring burst into flames. The entire room was engulfed in less than a minute, a minute tops to evacuate my home, which puts a whole new perspective on my idea of ​​what I had time to gather and escape. If you were to try to carry all of that, you would need a truck and trailer, it would have to be set up at all times and ready to load. Wait a minute, I modified my list by a substantial amount, now it’s:

1) Get granny

2) Leash the dog

3) Grab my Emergency Preparedness Kit (contains my laptop)

Get out of here! If I can get around in my wheelchair that’s fine, if not millions were made this year alone and I have insurance. Same with my ukulele, banjo and guitars, lots of each of them were made this year as well. There is nothing more important than grandma, wife, dog and me. Even now, leaving my laptop would not be a major problem since I have placed all my files in the “cloud”, Google+, I can retrieve them from any computer at any place as long as I have my passwords. Everything else is replaceable, everything my only priority is grandma, wife, dog, then me, out the door, someone will call the fire department if I don’t, I’m out in less than a minute. In conclusion, I hope I have inspired a few people to start putting together a family disaster plan, as well as building or buying a pre-assembled home emergency preparedness kit. FEMA recommends a 72 hour kit, a 14 day kit is a much better preparation kit. That is my opinion for this fact, my neighbors are not and will not be prepared for a disaster of this type. My personal desire to be prepared is to get to a point where we have a lot to ourselves and more to help other people when the need arises that I think will. I will never be able to deny someone a drink of water or something warm to use, just because they didn’t prepare it doesn’t mean they are anything other than “human”. Events can easily happen at any time of the day or night, doesn’t it seem like most unpleasant events happen during the worst storm of the year in the middle of the night?