Get Ready!: How to Prepare for and Stay Safe after a Pacific Northwest Earthquake - Couverture souple

Moller, Deb

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 1632173042 ISBN 13 : 9781632173041

Editeur : Sasquatch Books, 2021

Synopsis

The definitive guide to getting ready for and staying safe after a major earthquake in the Pacific Northwest. FEMA recommends being prepared for two weeks of self-sufficiency after it occurs, and this handbook will show you how with clear, informative, and easy-to-implement steps.

Recent seismic activity has made national headlines and underscored the fact that the Cascadia fault line off the coast of British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, and Northern California is overdue for a major earthquake. And when it happens, living conditions could be akin to those in the mid-nineteenth century.

This handbook covers the supplies you need to stay safely in place, including water, food (and food prep), first aid, sanitation, health and hygiene needs, shelter and bedding, and light/fire. It also includes lists of what to purchase and how to store it, as well as simple excercises to gain confidence in perfoming necessary tasks. Learn what to do during and immediately after an earthquake, how to develop a reunification plan, and how to communicate when basic infrastructure is down. It also addresses the particular concerns of those living in coastal areas (the tsunami zone) as well as those outside of the severe impact zone. It covers long-term ways to stay safe without modern conveniences and a crash course in survival techniques should the quake happen before all preparations are complete.

Get Ready! presents information in clear, practical, and managable steps, equipping the reader with the skills to care for themselves and their loved ones should a major earthquake hit. And when it does, the internet will not be an option, making this reference handbook invaluable. If you live in the Pacific Northwest, you need Get Ready!

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

Deb Moller is the former public-private partnerships manager at the Oregon Department of Emergency Management. She is a Senior Fellow at the Center of Excellence for Homeland Security and Emergency Management, under the Washington State Board of Community and Technical Colleges. She is a member of the Oregon Emergency Management Association and the Capital Area Emergency Management Committee. Deb is the founder of Cascadia Calling, an organization dedicated to earthquake preparedness in the region. She holds a master’s degree in applied behavioral science from
Bastyr University.

Extrait. © Reproduit sur autorisation. Tous droits réservés.

My 1949 Cape Cod–style house, with its dark shutters and
trimmed shrubs, blends in well: a small house on a quiet street in
the slow-paced capital city of Salem, Oregon. Unless, of course,
you go snooping under the sofa, where cans of water—carefully
placed on their sides in foil trays—hide.
My hallways look ordinary, but open the linen closet and
only one shelf holds sheets. The other three stock canned goods:
hearty soups, baked beans, tuna, beef stew. Pull out the drawers
below to reveal N95 masks, six bottles of hand sanitizer, batteries
of all sizes, two first-aid manuals for backcountry hikers, extralarge
bottles of various pain pills, and packages of heavy-duty
contractor garbage bags for lining buckets improvised into toilets.
Elsewhere in the house, shelves, cupboards, boxes, and bins are
filled with freeze-dried food, first-aid supplies, charcoal briquets,
and a camp stove.
What you’ve found are not the dark secrets of a paranoid
doomsday fearer or the stockpile of an agoraphobic homebody,
but the preparations of an expert who wants to be ready for the
very real threat of a 9.0 Cascadia subduction zone earthquake.
The Cascadia earthquake is the “Really Big One,” the earthquake
that locals have whispered about, the one that the New
Yorker freaked out the whole region about, the one that inspired
this book. If the full 620-mile-long fault unlocks, we’ll see what
scientists call a “full-rip” event (see page 4 for what this means),
causing severe shaking from west of I-5 to the coast and farther
east in some areas. When the shaking starts, we’ll be living in
the twenty-first century; when it stops, we’ll be living in the
1850s: no power, water, plumbing, phones, or internet. Few basic
public services and limited medical assistance. But our ancestors
survived back then, and we can too—if we’re prepared.
Emergency officials estimate that getting help to everyone
will take two weeks or more. That’s why I am “two-weeksready”—
I’m able to meet the needs of my family for fourteen
days without outside help. That’s why you should be too.
Preparation is hard to weave into modern life. Like so many
before me, I failed time and again to put aside the hours to make
the perfect emergency kit, to remember to rotate my food on the
perfect schedule, and to make new plans every time anyone in
the family changed jobs or schools.
I could tell you that getting ready for a catastrophic earthquake
is easy, a “just do it” proposition. I could tell you that the
tips and tricks I’ve included here will help you avoid every obstacle
along the way. I’d love to say I have a magic wand that can get
you ready to survive for two weeks in a snap. It would feel good
to tell you that. But it wouldn’t be true.
There isn’t a convenient empty space in your budget, your
schedule, or your house just waiting to be filled with “getting
ready.” You’ll have to find time, money, and space in a life where
all those things are probably already 100 percent (or more) spoken
for. I can help you with creative solutions to maximize your time,
money, and storage space, but it would be silly to say that adding
one more thing to an already busy life is easy. It won’t be.
Instead, you’ll have to consider why it is important to you to
prepare, why being prepared is more important than whatever
else is competing for your time, money, or space. Everyone’s
answer will be different.
I’ve only been involved professionally in emergency management
since 2016, when I became the public-private partnerships
manager at the Oregon Office of Emergency Management.
When I left that job, I started a community-based earthquake
preparedness organization called Cascadia Calling, to help people
outside the tsunami zone get ready for a 9.0 earthquake. But
my decades working in education and social service programs,
coupled with my master’s degree in applied behavioral science,
shape the advice in this book. Those experiences taught me that
preparedness, like any big endeavor, is best achieved by starting
small, doing a little on a consistent basis rather than a lot once
in a while, staying focused, expecting setbacks, having a plan,
learning from mistakes, and celebrating progress.
I’ve been personally dedicated to being more prepared for the
“unimaginable” since 2001, after the unthinkable happened on
my birthday—September 11. It has taken me years to be really
prepared for the Cascadia earthquake, and I’ve made tons of mistakes.
I want to save others from making those same mistakes. I
needed a book that covered not just all the “must-haves,” but was
a full guide to getting ready for a devastating natural disaster:
a how-to, when-to, and where-to-store-all-these-supplies road
map to preparedness. In writing this book, I created the book
that I wish I’d had: how to be as prepared as possible, in a way
that fits my life—to not let perfect be the enemy of good enough.
This book is designed to help a busy, distracted person—someone
just like me—get ready for the Cascadia earthquake. With
quick tasks, checklists, and useful tips, this book gives you ways
to fit getting prepared into your life—in the kinds of small chunks
of time you can carve out. It covers everything you need to know
to get ready to be on your own for two weeks after a full-rip 9.0
Cascadia earthquake, and gives you the skills and supplies to
help in many other types of natural disasters. It also explains just
why this is so important: the first two chapters cover the science
and statistics driving the recommendations. If you already know
enough about the Really Big One to want to be two-weeks-ready,
you can jump right to Chapter Three (page 26) and start preparing.

WHY SHOULD I GET READY?
Write down the answers to the following questions and post
them in a place where you’ll see them every day. If you don’t
remind yourself often of why being prepared is important to
you, you’re likely to stall in your progress before you get very far.
• Who depends on you to take care of them?
• What losses or suffering will you prevent by being
prepared?
• What worries or fears will you ease by being ready?
• What regrets will you avoid by acting now?
• Why is it important to you to survive an earthquake?
• Why is it important to you that you help others survive
an earthquake?

PREPARING FOR OTHER EARTHQUAKES
This book is about preparing for a catastrophic, full-rip 9.0
Cascadia subduction zone earthquake and the aftershocks to
follow. But if you are prepared for the Really Big One, you will
also be well equipped to deal with more-localized earthquakes.
Even so, what you should expect from a Cascadia subduction
zone earthquake is not the same as what a different fault
might produce. For example, a large earthquake generated by
either the Seattle Fault or the Portland Hills Fault will cause
severe damage to those cities, possibly even greater than a
9.0 Cascadia earthquake. But because there will be minimal
impact outside the respective metropolitan areas, help will
come within hours or days after such an earthquake. The reason
focusing on the Cascadia earthquake is so important is
because, unlike some of the more intense earthquakes that are
possible, the 620-mile length of the fault, coupled with the 9.0
magnitude of a Cascadia earthquake, will leave a massive area
without the infrastructure for help to arrive quickly. (See pages
5–6 for further discussion on intensity versus magnitude.) You
can’t prepare for every possibility, but being two-weeks-ready
gives you the best chance to weather whatever seismic activity
comes your way.
People in any community facing a major earthquake can
adapt this preparedness advice to their situation. Those who
live in Alaska or near the San Andreas (California), New Madrid
(Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Arkansas), or
Wasatch (Utah) Faults are especially at risk. An earthquake
of a much lower magnitude but higher intensity can cause
pervasive destruction across a heavily populated area. Being
two-weeks-ready is prudent if your city or county is at risk for
such an event.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Sasquatch Books
• Date d'édition: 2021
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 1632173042
• ISBN 13: 9781632173041
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 208
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible