February Winner and March Prize

Congratulations to the Schweidel family for winning the February prize, a Blackout Buddy Flashlight!

The March prize is a dual usb car charger.  This thing will charge most smartphones and most tablets that use a 5V charger (including ipads).  It can simultaneously charge two phones or a tablet and a phone.  So when the electricity goes out, you can charge your toys in the car.

Week 7: Learn to Shut Off Your Utilities

This week's task:  Learn how and when to shut off your utilities (electricity, natural gas, water, etc).  Make sure you have the right tools to do so.

After an earthquake (or in other circumstances), you may need to turn off your utilities.  Learn what to do and what tools you will need.

Natural Gas (from PG&E's website):    

Take action if:  You smell gas or hear a blowing or hissing noise.  

What to do:

1. Open a window & leave the building 
2. Turn off the gas at the main value, if possible.  Click here for specific instructions (with illustrations).  The gas valve is hard to turn.  Make sure you have a sturdy wrench with a long enough handle to give you some leverage. 
3. Call the gas company or 911 from a neighbor's phone.

Note: PG&E recommends that you do not turn off the gas after an earthquake unless you believe you have a leak.  If you do turn it off for any reason, you have to wait for it to be turned on by a professional (after the 1994 Northridge earthquake, it took 3 weeks to get everyone's gas turned back on).  

Electricity (from 72hours.org):

Take action if:

• Arcing or burning occurs in electrical devices.
• There is a fire or significant water leak.
• You smell burning insulation.
• The area around switches or plugs is blackened and/ or hot to the touch.
• A complete power loss is accompanied by the smell of burning material.

What to do:   

1. Locate your main electric switch, which is normally in the garage or outdoors. The panel box may have a flip switch or pull handle on a large circuit breaker.  
2. If the power goes out, turn off all electric appliances, and unplug major electric appliances to prevent possible damage when the power is turned back on.

If you see downed power lines, stay away from them to avoid being shocked, injured or killed.  Never touch wires lying on the ground or hanging on poles.  Don't touch an object that is touching a downed power line.   

Water:

Take action after a strong earthquake (to keep out contaminated water from burst lines outside your home - listen to the radio to see if the water supply is okay) or if a leak is starting to cause indoor flooding.

What to do:  Turn off your water at the main valve.  Watch this video from EBMUD to learn how.

If a single appliance is causing flooding (e.g. a toilet) you can shut off the water to that appliance only.   To learn more about how the water system in your house works and how to do basic plumbing repairs, download this EBMUD publication. 

Week 6: Stay Safe During and After an Earthquake

This week's task:   Hold an earthquake drill with your family. 

Earthquakes can shake hard.   Lisa Laycock, the wife of the mission president in Santiago, Chile during the Feb. 27th, 2010 earthquake, which lasted for three minutes, describes that earthquake below.  Santiago was about 200 miles from the quake epicenter:

"As the earthquake became more violent, the mission home groaned and wailed. The power died, so the whole city was black. The windows made a hideous screeching sound, and flying objects banged against swaying walls. The printer/fax machine, books, book ends, and fifty-pound television burst from the entertainment center and crashed to the floor, cabinets emptied, drawers flew open, the refrigerator moved, water sloshed out of the toilets, the floor jolted up and down as we ran across it trying to hold onto the walls to keep from falling down, and the piano toppled over like a small toy.... Finally, it stopped. When the calm came, we had to sit down because our legs were weak and unstable. My legs stayed wobbly all day and night yesterday. Today (Feb. 28) the muscles in my legs hurt like I ran a marathon."

UC San Diego has a very cool earthquake "shake table" that they build houses on and then shake them.  On this page you can watch videos of a bedroom and a kitchen undergoing the same pattern and intensity of shaking that occurred in the 1994 Northridge earthquake (in southern California).  Click on the video thumbnail to play it in your browser (this might also motivate you to secure your furniture if you didn't do it last week).

To prepare to keep safe during all of that shaking, let's do a family earthquake drill!

Steps (most of this information is taken from the FEMA website):

1. Review the DROP, COVER and HOLD procedure:  DROP to the ground; take COVER by getting under a sturdy table or other piece of furniture; and HOLD ON until the shaking stops. If there isn’t a table or desk near you, cover your face and head with your arms and crouch in an inside corner of the building.
2. Review FEMA's additional information about how to stay safe if the shaking starts when you are indoors, outdoors, or in a moving vehicle, or if you find yourself covered with debris when the shaking stops.  Also review what to do and what not to do immediately after the earthquake.  Click here for a pdf or here to go directly to the FEMA earthquake page - click on the 'during' and 'after' tabs to see the relevant information. 
3. Hold the drill!  Ideally, have several drills over the course of a couple days and have different family members in charge of starting the drill so that everyone has a chance to be surprised.
4. Schedule your next earthquake drill six months from now on your calendar (or as a repeating event if you use an e-calendar).

For extra credit, take San Francisco's goofy Quake Quiz to learn what to do if you are on BART or in a high rise building.

Extra stuff for parents of young children: 

• At night, the guidelines urge everyone to stay in their own bed until the shaking stops.  If you know you won't be able to stop yourself from running to your children, make sure the path between your room and theirs is clear of potential hazards. 
• Practice your earthquake drill with your children in all the different rooms of the house.  Where should they drop, cover and hold in each room?  
• If you have very small children who can't take cover by themselves, and who could be in different rooms from each other and from you, think through the different possible scenarios and plan what you will do.  For example, if the shaking starts while you are in the kitchen and the toddler is in her room and the baby is on the floor in the living room, what will you do?  Be extra vigilant about clearing potential hazards that could harm you or them before you get to them.

Week 5: Prepare Your Home for an Earthquake

This week's task: Identify hazards in your home that could pose a danger to your family during an earthquake or that could block your escape routes if quick evacuation were necessary immediately after an earthquake.  Make the necessary changes to eliminate the hazards (or reduce them as much as feasibly possible).

We live in Earthquake country.  Berkeley sits on the Hayward fault, which is expected to produce a major earthquake in the not-too-distant future. The last five major earthquakes on this fault were in 1315, 1470, 1630, 1725, and 1868.  That's an earthquake every 138 years on average. It's been 145 years since the last one.   Click here to see a map of the fault.  Click here to read about the destruction caused by the 1868 earthquake.

The 1868 Hayward earthquake and the 1906 San Francisco earthquake both lasted 45-60 seconds. The 2010 Chile earthquake lasted for 3 minutes.  That's a lot of time for things to fall, fly, and scoot around. The task this week is to identify things that could pose a hazard during or after a quake and take steps to reduce the possible danger.  

Step 1: Walk through your house and note things that could fall or fly across the room and injure someone during an earthquake.  Obviously if you have small children who could be playing out of arm's reach when the shaking starts, you will need to be extra vigilant about securing anything that could harm them.  

Also note things that could fall and block exits or make your escape route dangerous and difficult to navigate quickly if the earthquake causes a fire or gas leak or destabilizes the building.  You don't want to walk through spilled cleaning chemicals or slip and fall in a mess of spilled olive oil and broken glass or have to move heavy things out of the way to get to the door, especially if you are are helping children get out.   It may be difficult to get medical attention for non-life threatening injuries immediately after a major disaster, so preparing to avoid even small injuries could make a big difference in your ability to cope and care for your family.

A small aside about tip-over injuries in general: If you have children, read this to motivate yourself to secure your furniture.  Even short pieces of furniture can be tipped over by a child and suffocate him while he is trapped underneath.  And half of tip-over injuries to children are caused by a TV falling on them.

Step 2: Fix the problems you found in Step 1, keeping in mind that some things may not pose a danger to an adult, but would pose a danger to a child if you have children in your home.

• Secure large furniture & heavy/breakable items.  Hardware and kits for securing various types of furniture are available at hardware stores or online (search for "earthquake straps" on Amazon.com).  Don't store heavy things on high shelves.  Use museum putty to secure breakable decorations.  See this website for more information about securing your stuff.

• Move things that could fall behind a door and block access to a room.

• Move anything (including heavy pictures) that could fall on you in bed.  Move beds that are right next to windows.

• Secure cleaning chemicals.  If they are on a high open shelf, they could fall, break open, and mix (potentially creating deadly gases).  

• Put latches on kitchen cabinets that contain breakable or heavy items that could fall.  Child-safety latches will work.  Or these (which are pricey and not child-proof, but wonderfully easy to operate) are my favorite.

• Remove heavy items from glass-doored cabinets or reinforce the glass doors with plexiglass.

• Secure water heaters to a stud with a strap to prevent tipping.  Secure all gas appliances to prevent a gas line rupture.  

If you own an older home, it may need seimsic retrofitting.  Check with a local contractor for more information or get information online here.

For more information from the Red Cross about what to do before, during and after an earthquake, click here.

January Winner and February Prize

And the winner of the drawing for the January Prize is.....Rinda!  Congratulations!

If you didn't win, never fear, there is another prize on the horizon.  February's prize is the Eton Blackout Buddy Emergency LED Flashlight:

It plugs into the wall and bright LED's light up when the power goes out to provide emergency lighting.  It can also be used as a nightlight or flashlight.

There will be four weekly tasks to do in February (starting with the Week 4 task - Storing Water).  Do them all and you can enter to win this prize four times!  (Contest is open only to past and present members of the Berkeley Ward...sorry everybody else!)