Why I, Jessica C., prepare.
In the last few days nearly every news page and program is warning us of the impending disaster on the East Coast. For those of us with family and friends there, the threat is frightening and real. For many of us, we have watched people we love somehow survive nature’s displays of force. Many of us have survived events ourselves. I grew up in the Midwest and watched every year as tornadoes and floods destroyed houses and communities. As a child I lived with my parents, and it never occurred to me that it was silly to stay in a place where each year there was potential for our home to be destroyed. Why would we leave? This was our home. And so every year we replaced windows, and we dried out the basement, and we were happy no one got hurt. The worst year I remember was 1993, when the Water Works flooded and the whole city had no running water for about two months. Luckily the roads were still clear and we were able to rely on the National Guard’s weekly deliveries of drinking water to make it through the long, dirty summer.
When I moved to the Portland, OR in 1996, I thought, “Hurray! No more floods! No more tornadoes!” I vaguely remembered when Mt. St. Helens erupted and I naively thought I was moving to a “safe” part of the country. One morning at about 4 am I woke up. I couldn’t quite place what was going on, but when I looked around it felt like I couldn’t focus my eyes, everything was sort of blurry. I fell back to sleep and when I woke up again, I started to think about what had happened. It occurred to me that it might have been an earthquake, so I jumped on the computer and searched. I found the USGS website and looked at recent activity. Sure enough I had felt my first earthquake.
I started asking questions about where I lived, and found out I was in a fairly active earthquake zone, not to mention all the active volcanoes in the area. But no one told me about preparedness, and since nobody I talked to could tell me any stories of living through great earthquake disasters, I didn’t prepare.
I moved to San Francisco for a couple years, and even there it didn’t really sink in that the entire town had been reduced to rubble less than 100 years before I arrived. There hadn’t been anything major recently and most of the bad earthquake activity was in LA. No big deal. Again I didn’t prepare. I was a single girl working at a low paying retail job, and trying to survive in one of the most expensive cities in the country. Storing a week of supplies in my tiny room was not on my agenda. Besides, if something happened, wouldn’t the government take care of me?
I moved to Seattle six years ago, still not convinced I needed to prepare, after all, I had survived San Francisco without an earthquake plan, right? Walking down Broadway, my then boyfriend, now husband, pointed out the remaining vestiges of the 2001 Nisqually quake. Not a huge one, but it did cause considerable damage. And it was less than 10 years ago. And my neighborhood was affected. This got me thinking a little more.
Shortly after the Chile and Haiti quakes, I came home from work and my husband came back from a meeting of CHiPP. He told me their story and their mission, and he had been convinced that it was time to do something. I still wasn’t ready. I was busy with work, the thought of buying all that stuff was a little overwhelming, I mean, I really wanted a new pair of shoes, not two weeks worth of beef jerky and toilet paper. On the other hand, I trust my husband and his cause for concern made me do more research.
What did I learn? I learned that the Pacific Northwest has potential for more kinds of natural disasters than just about anywhere else in the country. In the state of Washington we have floods, tsunamis, tornadoes, wildfires, wind storms, volcanic eruptions, and earthquakes. Just to name a few. I started to get nervous. Then I read a story. It was a Native American tale about a giant battle between Thunderbird and Whale. It was about a huge fight that took place and shook the earth and caused the sea to swell, and it happened to correspond with a geological event that was recorded here in Washington in 1700. The Northwest has the distinguishing quality of being on a subduction zone. What that means is that two of the Earth’s tectonic plates are resting on top of each other right under our feet. If one of the plates slips underneath the other one, well, think of when a truck goes under a bridge that is too low, a lot of matter gets displaced.
Thinking about this got me very uneasy. The odds are low, but the potential for disaster is very very high. After watching the governments response to Katrina and Ike, and the devastation in Chile and Haiti, I finally decided not to leave it up to chance.
Over the last year, my husband and I have gotten prepared. We took free classes offered by the City of Seattle Emergency Operations Center to create a plan. We became actively involved in CHiPP so that we can help other people get their preparedness plans together. We stockpiled two weeks of food and drinkable water so that if the water lines are compromised, or roads are blocked and we can’t get to a grocery store (or the food trucks can’t get to the grocery store) we have food to eat. We amassed an impressive disaster first aid kit so that when the emergency response teams are overwhelmed we can take care of emergencies until we can get help. I got my amateur radio license and joined emergency radio groups so that we can communicate with other parts of the city should the phone lines be severed or overloaded.
When the earthquake happened earlier this year in Japan, I was so thankful that I didn’t have to think about what I would do in their place, I was ready. Japan sits on a subduction zone as well, and what happens here will be very similar to what happened there. Now after the unusual earthquake activity across the country I am more thankful I am prepared.
So with that I encourage everyone who reads this to take one action to move yourself into better preparedness. If you have kids or pets, or someone else you take care of, you have no excuse to not do this. Buy one can of food at the grocery store. Or check your medicine cabinet to make sure you have a first aid kit. Or prepare one gallon of drinkable water that can be stored for several months. Or double check that the batteries in your flashlight still work.
If it still feels like too much, let us know. We can help you find information, and help you create a personal preparedness plan that fits with your lifestyle. Don’t wait until it happens to wonder what you will do.
