Tag: emergency

How to Prepare for a Natural Disaster

Getting ready for emergencies especially natural disasters should be an integral part of your future planning. Since natural disasters can strike anytime, survival becomes almost impossible if you do not have enough supplies and stock in your hut. Water is contaminated, food shortage, and shelter issues are common issues you may face in emergencies. Therefore, you must be ready for such unforeseen disasters to ensure your survival. It is imperative to save yourself from both physical and final losses. Here are guidelines on how to prepare for a natural disaster:

Two Disaster Supply Kits: One for Your Car and Other for Home

It is imperative to have two survival kits. One long-term survival kit for your home, while other short term kit having supplies for two to five days in your car is important. Just in case disaster arrives while you are away from home, you should have supplements in your carcase. Keep plenty of Freeze dried food or dehydrated food on the ready at least a 3 day supply is recommended by the FDA. Emergency essentials such as a flash light, food and water are critical.

Figure out the Type of Disasters You Could Come Across

To begin with, your preparation, you must first determine type of crisis you could face in future. Consider the natural disasters such as earthquake, hurricane, tornados, floods, etc. the best way to determine is to contact with local Red Cross agencies. They can best guide you about the risks in your area.

Write a Plan

Once you have determined the type of disasters that could strike your area, next step is to write a plan according to different scenarios. A number of ways can help you to write a plan with respect to different crisis. You can contact local agencies and websites such as ready.gov to come up with a template of your write up plan. Be sure you plan is purely based on disasters.

Warnings on Alarming Situations

Keeping yourself informed about possible disasters is important. Since sirens are only out of door alarms, sometimes you do not get it. Therefore, you must arrange two or three ways to get warnings related to any overwhelming situation. Many government agencies nowadays offer alarming services you can receive directly in your cell phone.

Keep an Eye on News

Natural disasters such as earthquake, hurricane, tornado, winter storms, and floods can pose big issues to your life and assets. Therefore, you must keep an eye on the news channels regarding climate changes to make an escape if a disaster is predicted.

Buy Long Term Food Supplies

Food becomes expensive or short which is why you must stock several items to ensure you will have something to eat while going through tough times. For that, you must visit local grocery shops from where you can purchase long-term food items such as freeze-dried food, dried foods, and other meals. Such items can last even for 30 years if stocked properly. You must buy basic food meals to store for emergency preparedness.

Shelter and Clothing

Disasters often damage buildings and homes where living becomes dangerous. You should buy a shelter and clothing for your emergency preparedness.

Besides, these essentials, you must analyze the things you ought to keep with you at any cost to survive from any emergency.

Tornado Safety

When tornado approaches, you have only limited time to make life or death decisions. In such situation, advance planning and quick response are the major keys to survive. Likewise, there are necessary prioritizations to be set, which must be sorted out when disasters like tornado occurs. First priority is life safety and the other one is stabilization. Following is a detailed discussion based on these two points:

Training for Novice

This is being considered a primary protective action, which includes providing necessary training to novice and unknown people, who get worried and nervous in such situations. This is because if you are not well trained or are badly trained, you may suffer or anyone related to you can be caught in some serious condition.

Plan your Risk

Depending upon the nature of emergency and circumstances, one of the most important decisions is to clarify the fact that you need to stay at current place or you must evacuate it. You should understand and plan for both possibilities. Such actions should be taken before, during, and after an event, and these must be always unique for each hazard. These plans are helpful in identifying such hazards and come up with certain recommendations to deal with them.

Know the Signs of Tornado

According to weather forecasting team, most of the tornados came without any warning and ultimatum in early days. Therefore, you must keep yourself ready and prepare to face such disastrous situations. Let us have a quick look at some common observations and signs to judge tornados, which are:

  • Persistent rotation of the clouds
  • Hail or heavy rain
  • Intense wind shift
  • Continuous roar and rumble
  • Silver lightening up in the clouds

Allocate the Safety Area

Many methods can help you to stabilize these incidents and minimize the potential damages. Try to designate a safer area in your home where you can assemble all of the family members in response to such tornados. Always keep in mind that room you choose should be away from a window to minimize the effect. When tornado arises, you must use that particular room for safety and cover yourself with a couch or cushion. This will provide you with effective protections from all sides.

How to Minimize the Effect of Tornado?

After the tornado, keep all of the family members in one place and wait for the emergency personnel to arrive. Keep yourself away from all of the power lines or wires because electrical currents can affect you. Moreover, stay away from heavily damaged houses and building because they can collapse any time. Most importantly, you need to stay calm in all situations and try to listen carefully the necessary instructions, guidelines, and information being provided given by concerned emergency officials. By this, you will be able to come out of that situation with ease.

All these points provide a platform of learning, which includes dealing with hazards or disasters especially tornado. Moreover, developing and customizing effective plans for these hazards will help everyone to reduce the impact of disasters and may save the lives of other people and prevent infinite injuries easily.

Prepare For an Earthquake: How to Avoid Physical and Financial Losses

Preparing for natural disasters especially earthquake is important to save your life as well as property. Earthquakes can strike any place anytime without any warning, which is why you are always advised to be ready for any possible shock. You cannot do certainly with magnitude of earthquake and its aftershocks, but you can do enough to prevent yourself from physical and financial loses. However, to know that, preparing for earthquake is important.

What You can Do to Prepare for an Earthquake

Some people may think it a useless thing but emergency preparedness for earthquake can save you from many hassles during and after earthquake. Here are some recommended checklists by emergency and management agencies you can consider in order to preparing for an earthquake:

Before An Earthquake Strikes

Preparing for earthquake does not require any special arrangements. All you need is to ensure you place household goods in an ordered form. Here is what you should be doing before an earthquake occurs.

First off, you must place your heavy household goods on lower shelves. Do not place them on heights as if earthquake rattles the shelves, heavier stuff on them can pose serious problems. Moreover, make sure you zip shelves safely to walls.

In order to avoid financial loss, you must store breakable stuff in lower and closed shelves. You can also store them in cabinets and buckets but they should be closed.

If there is something, you need to hang, be sure it is away from your bed. Hang them at least five to four feet away from your bed to ensure it would not fall on you if earthquake occurs.
Light fixtures must be braced.

Wireless electric dog fence system, gas, and water pipelines should be repaired. Besides, tell everyone in your home how to turn off light, gas, and water.

You must have an idea about places where you can stay safe, but away from buildings, electrical lines, and bridges.

Even though earthquakes do not last long but they can leave huge impacts. Therefore, you must prepare yourself with respect to basic needs. Get your food supplies, storage kits, living kits and other necessities ready in order to survive in emergency. These things require long term planning which is why you should start preparing your food storage and other supplies from now.

While an Earthquake Occurs

  • Take cover under a strong piece of furniture such as your bed or high sofa
  • Do not try to leave immediately as it could be the dangerous thing to do
  • If you are outside home, then be sure to stay at an open place away from streetlights and buildings
  • Do not go inside home until the shaking stops
  • If you are driving, then park your vehicle along the roadside

After Earthquake

  • Be ready for aftershocks that can last for months
  • Look injured and trapped people in and around your home to help them out of the crisis
  • Do not go under damaged buildings
  • Inspect your home for damages