Saturday, March 29, 2014

PSA: Preparedness

Last night I was typing away, and felt a sharp jolt for about a second around 8 PM. Went to the USGS "Did You Feel It?" website, self-reported my experience, noted it was a small earthquake a couple of miles from where I was sitting, and went back to web surfing.
A little more than an hour later, I spent the better part of 30 seconds under the same desk while the place got its ass kicked by the 5.1 that followed, again just a bare few miles away from where I'm sitting when I'm home. And I wondered if I had a handy set of clean undershorts.

Today it's mainly been just a drill, and the results were, thank a merciful God, extremely minor in the grand scheme.

The upsides are that the roof and walls are fine, the stuff I keep on hand was sufficient, and even a far worse shake would have likely been something I could've handled. (Still need more clean undershorts though.)

The downsides are that I really, really hate this stuff, because you never know a moderate small quake is either of those things until it finally stops (and thirty seconds of rocking and rumbling under furniture is a long time to wonder about that, believe me), because the little ones and the big ones start out exactly the same. The big ones just keep building and going on until you're pretty certain you're in deep doodoo. Ask me how I know.

So for last night, my issue was unfortunate proximity to ground zero.
That, and dozens of random noticeable aftershocks, including the 9:02 AM one that provided today's wake up alarm. That's all normal, and they'll continue with diminishing frequency into the next week. (And having gone through 2 bigger ones, which IMHO gives one a mild but permanent case of TSD, not PTSD, because it's never "Post-" until you die, in this case.)

The cat isn't liking things any better, having tried to climb into me during last night's festivities, adopting the spot beneath the chair I'm in now as her default Safety Zone with each follow-up shake, and generally regarding the entire world with suspicion with each additional aftershock.

So wherever you are, and whatever the regional problem is likely to be when the word "disaster" is mentioned - tornado, hurricane, earthquake, floods, severe winter storms, or what have you - do please take the time to do some proper prior planning, set back food, water, car supplies, and so on, and generally make all the preparations you reasonably can so that when things get suddenly crappy, you're part of the solution, and not part of the problem.

Added: And BTW, that happygas they've been propagating about "72 hours" on your own is utter rose fertilizer. 72 hours isn't a disaster, it's a minor inconvenience, like Woodstock. Make your plans for successfully navigating a period of 30 days without outside resupply of the major necessities of life, and then beef it upwards over time until you're ready for a problem of multiple months. All 72 hours buys you is the certainty of living in a FEMA shelter on Day Four, which is an abysmally poor prospect. 

And don't forget a change of shorts.

Song Of The Day: AC/DC You Shook Me All Night Long

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