Week 15: Prepare to Shelter in Place

This week's tasks:

1. Learn how to shelter in place
2. Add shelter-in-place supplies to your emergency kit (sufficient plastic sheeting or heavy-duty garbage bags and duct tape to seal off windows, doors, vents, and outlets in your 'shelter-in-place' room plus duct tape for the car.)
3. Download the Red Cross Shelter-in-Place Fact Sheet and put it in your emergency binder for quick reference.

If hazardous materials are released into the air, communities can be ordered to 'shelter in place', which means to take your family and your emergency supplies, including a portable radio, to an interior room of your home (preferably with few or no windows) and seal it off with plastic sheeting and duct tape until the hazardous materials have dissipated enough that people can safely go back outside.   Those of you who are local probably remember the Richmond Refinery Fire last August, which prompted shelter-in-place orders in Richmond and El Cerrito.

How to shelter in place at home:

• Choose an interior room with few or no windows.
• Take your family and emergency supplies into the room (including food and water)
• Close and lock the windows, turn off your heating/air circulation system, and close the fireplace damper.
• Use plastic sheeting or heavy duty garbage bags (plastic wrap commonly used for food is too thin) and duct tape to seal off cracks around the door and window(s) and to cover and seal around air vents and outlets in your shelter-in-place room. Your goal is to keep all outside air from coming in.
• Listen to the radio to find out when it's safe to come out.
• When it's safe to come out, open all the doors and windows to air out the house.

If you are in your car:

• Pull over.
• Close the windows and vents.
• Seal the vents with duct tape.
• Listen to the radio for instructions and information.

How will you know a shelter-in-place order is in effect?  Communities have different ways of notifying their residents, but here are some possibilities:

• "All-Call" telephoning—an automated system for sending recorded messages, sometimes called "reverse 9-1-1."Emergency Alert System (EAS) broadcasts on the radio or television.
• Outdoor warning sirens or horns.
• News media sources—radio, television and cable.
• NOAA Weather Radio alerts.
• Residential route alerting—messages announced to neighborhoods from vehicles equipped with public address systems.

The Red Cross Shelter-in-Place Fact Sheet contains step-by-step instructions about how to shelter in place in your home, work, school or car.  Put a copy in your emergency binder for quick reference if you have to shelter in place.

Week 14: Fire Safety

This week's tasks: Hold a fire drill, test your smoke alarms, and review FEMA's fire safety guidelines.

Make an escape plan and practice a fire drill in your home:

• Click here to learn about making an escape plan.  Remember, every family member should know "two ways out" of every room.  Practice your plan twice a year.

Test your smoke alarms (and change the batteries if needed):

• Smoke alarms should be checked monthly.  In smoke alarms that take non-lithium batteries, the batteries should be replaced yearly.  In smoke alarms powered by a 10-year lithium battery, the battery cannot be replaced so the whole unit should be replaced periodically according to the manufacturers instructions.  Click here to find out more about smoke alarms.

Review FEMA's fire safety guidelines:

Download and review FEMA's Home safety checklist to see how you are doing with fire safety in your home.  The FEMA website also has a lot of other good information about fire safety.  Here are a few highlights and links to get more specific information:

• Earthquakes and Fire Safety - Check out this page to learn how to minimize the risk of fire after an earthquake.  You can download this handout as a quick reference to include in your emergency binder. 
• Fire Safety in Bedrooms: Bedrooms are a common area for fires to start.  Typical culprits: (1) children playing with matches (while hiding in confined spaces like under the bed or in the closet) - children start 35,000 bedroom fires annually, (2) electrical appliances, and (3) smoking.  Click the link to learn more about bedroom fire safety.
• Electrical Fire Safety - Don't overload your circuits.  Don't run cords under rugs.  Click the link to learn more.
• Fire Safety for High Rise Residents - Special tips for staying safe in a high-rise fire.
• Fire Extinguishers: Learn about the different kinds of fire extinguishers, how to use them, and how to know when to use them (versus just evacuating the building as quickly as possible)
• Cooking Fire Safety - Choose the right equipment and use it properly.  I used a fringed dish towel to take something out of the oven once and the fringes touched the heating element and caught on fire.  So don't do that.  Click on the link to learn more. 

Week 13: Assemble an Emergency Kit for your Car and Office

This week's task: Assemble emergency kits for your car and office

Car Emergency Kit

Your car emergency kit should contain supplies to help you if your car breaks down and/or if you end up stranded because of infrastructure damage after a disaster.  Of course, the types of items you will need will depend on where you drive and the weather in your area.   Here is a list to get you started (taken largely from this book):

Basic Emergency Supplies:

Flashlight
Water
Food
Sturdy shoes
Rain poncho
Coat or sweatshirt
Emergency whistle
First Aid kit
Heavy blankets or emergency blankets

Basic Automotive Supplies:

Jumper cables/jumpstart battery booster
Roadside triangle reflectors or flares (Cyalume flares, LED flares)
Small tool kit (screwdrivers, adjustable wrench, pliers)
Spare tire, jack, lug wrench,board
Maps and/or GPS units
ABC or BC fire extinguisher
Spare fuses

Additional supplies:

Work Gloves
Small gas can
Tow strap
Bungee tie-down cords
Fix-a-Flat tire inflator and sealant (quick temporary fix to flat tire)
Tire pump and guage (fill or check a leaky tire)
Cell phone charger

Cold-Weather supplies:

Windshield ice scraper
Bag of coarse sand (to provide traction in mud or snow)
Hand-ratcheted wench (to pull vehicle out of mud or snow)
Folding Shovel (for digging out tires)

I also keep backup child supplies in my car (diapers, sunscreen, food for the kids) both for emergencies and for run-of-the-mill forgetful parent moments.

Office Emergency Kit

I keep water, a flashlight, an emergency whistle and a little food in my office.  In some types of emergencies, you could be stranded in your location for awhile.  If you have to drive over a bridge to get home, you could be stranded for a few days.  

Week 12: Assemble a 72-hour kit, Part 2

This week's tasks:  Add a 3-day supply of food and a change of clothing to your 72-hour kit

Add food to your 72-hour kit:

How much food do you need?  The easiest way to figure that out is to count calories.  An adult needs 2000-2600/day and kids need around 1500-1600 calories/day.  If you are the mother of a nursing baby, click here for more information about keeping backup supplies on hand.  Once you add up your family's total caloric needs for 3 days, you are ready to go shopping - just add up the calories of everything you choose and keep buying more until you get to your total.  Remember that a post-disaster situation will be stressful and being hungry will make it harder to cope.

You have two broad choices for emergency food: (1) Emergency rations designed for long-term storage or (2) Regular, familiar food that has to be rotated regularly.   I have some of both.

Emergency Rations:  There are various options out there.  Here are a couple I'm familiar with.

1. High Calorie bars - These give you a lot of calories/square inch (the package has 3600 calories - inside the foil, they are wrapped in individual 200-calorie units). These particular bars taste like coconut shortbread cookies, but I've also seen lemon-flavored ones. They have a five-year shelf life.  
2. MRE's - These are what military personnel eat in the field.  This site has a large selection.  Keep in mind that the entrees only have 200-300 calories each, so 3 entrees are not a full day of food for an adult.  The 'side' dishes provide the extra calories (mixed nuts, peanut butter, crackers, drink mix, etc).  Shelf life is generally at least five years.

Buy real food I know my family likes:  Look for non-perishable items that have a lot of calories per unit of volume and have a shelf-life of at least six months to a year.  To make rotation easier, I keep my food list in a spreadsheet.  Along with the total calories, I write down the expiration dates so that I can scan the list every six months and replace the things that will expire soon (I wrote about my rotation plan in more detail last week).

Here is my food list for my family of 2 adults, 1 toddler and a baby: Excel spreadsheet, pdf.

Also, remember to include whatever dishes and utensils you will need to eat your food, open cans, etc. If you will need to wash dishes, include dish soap, a large ziploc bag, and dish cloth.

Add clothes to your 72-hour kit:

The Red Cross suggests that your 72-hour kit should include an extra change of clothes, a hat, sturdy shoes, and work gloves.

If you have kids/babies, consider items like blankets, jackets, burp cloths, diapers and wipes, and warm pajamas.  Often, a child doesn't have 'extra' pajamas, jackets, shoes, etc. that fit and can go in an emergency kit where they will rarely (or never) be worn.  I've gotten around this in two ways - for my baby boy, I put his big sister's old things that are too girlish for his regular use in the kit.  For my oldest, I put things in the kit that are a size too big - baggy clothes will work fine in an emergency.   I check the clothes at least once a year when I rotate the food, pull out the stuff she has grown into, and replace it with new stuff that is too big.  Shoes are more of a problem, but flip flops are a good option that are more forgiving if they don't fit right (especially if they are too big rather than too small).  If you have other ideas, put them in the comments.

For Mothers of Nursing Babies

If you have a nursing baby, storing food and water for yourself in an emergency is especially important.  Remember that you need around 500 extra calories per day plus plenty of water.  Also, consider the possibility that you will be unavailable to feed the baby for some period of time after a disaster.  If you are away from the baby during an earthquake, damage to infrastructure could make it difficult or impossible to get home quickly. In a worst-case scenario, you could be killed or badly injured.

Things to Think About:

• Consider keeping bottles and a 3-day supply of formula on hand.  Playtex Nursers with disposable drop-in liners are a good choice so that you can minimize bottle washing if the water supply is disrupted.  (You would still have to wash the nipples.)
• If you have a large supply of frozen milk, your baby can drink that for a day or two.  But if the power goes out, it may not be safe to drink once it has been unfrozen for more than 24 hours (even if you are able to keep it cold).  And since it may be difficult to get medical help post-disaster, following food safety protocols to avoid food-born illness should be a high priority.
• If someone other than yourself sometimes takes the baby places in the car, consider keeping a baby bottle, some bottled water, and a few servings of formula in the car in case they get stranded and can't get back to you.  These single serving formula pouches are ideal for this purpose (there are 16 pouches in a box, so you could divy them up with a friend if you are only using them for emergency supplies).
• If you are frequently away from your baby, consider keeping a hand pump in your bag or car so that you can express milk (for your comfort and to maintain your milk supply) if you can't get back to the baby quickly.