You Survived the Evacuation, Can You Survive the Shelter?

Ok, you have been evacuated and you survived the emergency. You were prepared and had your 72 hour kit ready. You grabbed everything you needed and made it safely to the emergency shelter. Now the question is; can you survive the shelter? Being prepared for what to expect, when forced to stay in an evacuation shelter for 2-3 days, will go a long way in making it a tolerable visit.

First, be prepared for the lack of privacy. Your 72 hour kit has the essentials that you need to survive, consider adding some items that will increase your comfort level. Ear plugs, think 100 people sleeping in 1 big room, chances are you are going to have several people within earshot that snore. Restful sleep goes a long way towards making a bad ordeal bearable. When grabbing pillows consider allowing each family member to bring their personal pillow, just that touch of home may help to comfort children. For additional moments of privacy consider taking your family out to your vehicle if possible to have some quiet family time. An extra sheet that can be draped to section off a small space for your family will help. Personal DVD players, CD players, i-Pods® or radios will allow you to disconnect from your surroundings for a while; don’t forget headphones and extra batteries.

Second, be prepared to wait in line for some services or conveniences. Food lines, overcrowded bathrooms, limited water availability are real possibilities. Having some snacks will allow you to eat something while waiting for the chow line to diminish. A sealable bucket that can be use as an emergency toilet can help with a child’s immediate need to go, move to a secluded area or drape a sheet around them for privacy. Your own supply of water will be a valuable asset. Above all be patient and understanding, everyone is in the same situation. Use the opportunity to show your children examples of appropriate and inappropriate behavior, make it a leaning experience. Set the proper example.

Third, stay busy either with the activities that you have brought to entertain or by volunteering to assist with chores around the shelter. Time passes slowly when sitting and watching a clock. You will be surprised at how fast the day goes if you busy yourself helping others. Offer to organize children’s activities, start a card game or set up a small DVD viewing for children, if you are so equipped. Group activities like trivia, sing a-longs, party games and other such fun will help pass the time. Remember, not everyone will want to participate, so respect the rights of others. Have your activities in designated places that allow other to separate themselves if they desire. Sweep floors or do dishes if necessary, anything to keep active is better that sitting and sulking.

Lastly, stay focused and organized. Should conditions warrant you may be required to move to a safer facility. Be prepared to grab and go on short notice. Just knowing what to expect and anticipating potential problems will help make your ordeal less traumatic. Consider planning a weekend family campout as a test run for an actual evacuation. What you learn from that experience may be invaluable. Stay safe and keep prepping.

Your 72 Hour Kit is Ready, Let's Evacuate!

Your doorbell rings and you answer it to find a policeman standing on your front porch. Fortunately he is not there to question you about that episode of road rage you experienced last week. Unfortunately, he is there to tell you there has been a train wreck. A rail car carrying toxic chemicals has split open and the wind is pushing a lethal cloud in the direction of your home. You must evacuate now and go to a shelter. You can choose to travel north or south but you have to get at least 20 miles out of town to be safe from the prevailing winds. He hands you a list of available shelters in both directions and tells you to be gone in 5 minutes. If you stay you will suffer breathing difficulties that could result in death, there will be no emergency services available as they are busy moving nursing homes and hospitals. No one will be allowed back in the area for 48 hours while the toxins dissipate.

Good thing you took our advice and made up that 72 hour kit. You open the closet grab the buckets and head for the car. Then it hits you. Wait a minute, what about the dog? Your daughter is at work this afternoon and she is 2 miles closer to the accident scene and your spouse is on the way home in rush hour traffic. You open your cell phone and realize that you have not heard from anyone because you cannot call out yourself. Circuits are all busy, a cell tower was taken down in the train wreck. It's then you realize that there is more to emergency preparedness than putting together a 72 hour kit.

Don't get discouraged, it's not as bad as it seems. Preparation is an ongoing process; you have to keep working at it little by little. Soon you will look back and see how far you have progressed in the journey and be amazed at how good it feels to know you have done something significant for your family. We are going to discuss in future articles the following subjects and more.

• What about your pets, emergency shelters are not a Hotel for Dogs or cats either.
• Does your family have a rendezvous point if access to your home is prohibited?
• How would you communicate with family members if telephone service was disrupted?
• Besides your 72 hour kit, are there other things you should take with you if you have to evacuate?
• You survived the disaster, can you survive the night in the shelter?
• Food Storage, add it to your preparedness plan.
• Long term survival planning, weeks, months or more.

Remember, anything you do to make yourself better prepared is a step towards building a better Living Insurance Policy. Commit to keeping your families preparedness a priority, we will help you work on the process. Stay safe and keep on prepping.

OK I’m Ready To Do Something, How Do I Start To Prepare?

Good, making a decision to buy some Living Insurance is the first step. You’ve decided to provide your family an extra layer of security should the unexpected happen. Preparing for any and every disaster or emergency situation can seem like an overwhelming task, so let’s start with just the basics.

If you were to experience a minor interruption of normal daily living that required you to stay home and stay inside for a day or two, you probably have enough substance around the house to sustain yourself. Such an occurrence would be an inconvenience not a crisis. But suppose you had to evacuate your home for 24 to 48 hours. Unexpected flooding, mud slides, tornado or wind damage, chemical spill or environmental accident, any one of these incidents could require you and your neighbors to move to an emergency shelter until it was safe to return home. You may only have a few minutes to grab and go once the evacuation is ordered or required. What would you take?

If you are lucky enough to have family or friends outside of the evacuation zone your experience is likely to be significantly less traumatic. But if you have to rely on a local emergency shelter for refuge, think about what you may experience. No privacy, minimal comfort, the possibility of long lines for food, water and restrooms, potential sanitary issues and hours of boredom. You’re not going to die, but it might seem like a better alternative. So let’s start here and put together a basic 72 hour kit.

First step, go out to the garage and see if you can find some 5 gallon buckets with lids. They should be clean and sealable; Home Depot sells them for about $2.50 each. Depending on the size of your family you may need 2 or 3. They are the perfect storage containers for your starter kit. They hold a good amount of supplies and can double as a seat, foot rest, trash container or even toilet. Next buy a plastic wrapped case of bottled water, check your local paper for discounts, I have seen them for $3-$4.00 on sale. The plastic wrap makes it easy to carry and individual bottles have their advantages. If necessary, space out your purchases so that they fit into your budget accordingly.

What’s next, think about comfort? A plastic blowup air mattress like you used to play with at the beach or pool. Hey, I know it’s not great but compared to sleeping on the floor its heaven and you can toss enough for the whole family in the bottom of a bucket. Put in a change of underwear for each member of the family. You can wear the same clothes for 2 or 3 days but a change in underwear will make it much more bearable. Plus it beats the inside, outside, wearer’s choice 3 day option. Add the following as applicable to your family, 3 days supplies of medicine, a small bottle of Tylenol, a couple of rolls of toilet paper, hand sanitizer, bar of soap, a couple of washcloths and hand towels, toothbrushes and a small container of toothpaste.

Having taken care of the basic creature comforts let’s talk about food. Hopefully your shelter will be able to provide basic nourishment, think cafeteria food, right, you can survive on it but would you want to. Depending on the size and ages of your family members you may want to supplement your basic shelter diet with some extras. Pack the following in a bucket according to your individual tastes. Baby food or formula if needed, beef jerky, trail mix, granola bars, peanut butter or cheese crackers, pop top cans of fruit, pasta or pudding, some candy bars and water flavor packets. Don’t forget plastic spoons. You might find some of these goodies make great barter items that you can trade for other wants or needs.

Lastly, don’t forget something to deal with the boredom. Add to your kit a deck of cards, kid’s books, paper, pencil, crayons, crosswords or sudoku, a small bible. Put in a disposable camera, you are going to see some sites that you will want to document for when you tell your story of survival. That’s the basics; again depending on the size of your family you should be able to accomplish this for less than $50, check your local dollar store, a number of these items can be aquired there. Put a note on the outside of your bucket to remind you to grab throw pillows, fleece blankets and a couple of bed sheets. If you have some room in a bucket or an extra one there are some items that might be helpful to include. A flashlight and batteries, rope, duct tape, pocket knife or multi tool, tarp, work gloves, whistle, first aid kit, matches, a hammer and pliers. If you had these permanently stored in a bucket to go that would be great, if not write another reminder note to grab them, if you have the time, they could be important. Locate your water and buckets in a convenient storage place, preferably a closet by the front door. Don’t forget to rotate perishables by package dates and underwear for growing children.

Just having these basics is probably not a matter of life or death. But it can be the difference between your family just surviving an emergency or coping comfortably during a crisis. Now get busy and Do It. We will discuss in future posts Shelter Survival Tricks and helpful additions to your basic 72 hour kit. Be safe and Happy Prepping.

You Probably Have Life Insurance, But Do You Own Any Living Insurance

We live in perilous times. What if the worst actually happened to you? Fire, Flood, Hurricane, Earthquake, Natural Disaster or Man Made Catastrophe, what would you do to survive. Anyone who has lived through a disaster will tell you, the grocery store shelves empty quickly, shelter will be a concern and basic government services like police, fire and emergency response agencies may not be available for some time. Most of those people will also tell you that they never expected it to happen to them.

In the weeks and months ahead we will be discussing several different levels of preparedness. We realize different areas of the country have higher probabilities of certain events occurring. Now that we live in Michigan we do not need to prepare for a hurricane. Our friends in Florida will not likely need a vehicle safety kit for a snow storm. Plus, we understand that the focus and intensity of everyone varies with circumstances and that can dictate the extent to which they determine their personal level of preparedness.

We will discuss what the minimum needs are, should you have to leave you home for just a few days, that 72 hour kit stuff. What to do in case of a fire, a local emergency or a statewide disaster, right up to what you should do if our country was attacked with a nuclear weapon or EMP. We will talk about how to plan for the basic and how to keep working on your plan for the worst case scenario.

In addition, having lived it, we know that most every family has to balance the needs and the wants in accordance with their budget. We will discuss tips to prepare with a minimum of expense, low cost tricks to go easy on the budget, how to save on preparedness purchases and some great gadgets if you can afford to devote some extra money towards your safety net.

DON’T BE ONE OF THOSE PEOPLE WHO SAY “It’s Never Going to Happen to Us”, we hope it doesn’t. But just to be safe let’s make a few plans just in case, think of it as easing you conscience. You’ve read this, you’ve been warned. There I go preaching again, the kids will be calling to lecture me. Well, what the heck. You have been warned, and by better people than us I’m sure. Sleep a little easier at night knowing that you have done something positive for you family to keep the extra safe. Life insurance protects your family if you die. Living insurance lets you protect them if people are dying all around you. Buy some Living Insurance today, start a basic grab and go disaster kit.

Who are those Crazy PF Preppers?

What's a PF Prepper? We are folks, probably just like you, who happen to believe in that old adage "An Ounce of Prevention is Better than a Pound of Cure."

A little about us personally. We are 2 empty nest couples who have lived in Brighton, Michigan for the past 15 years. Prior to that, both our families lived in the Tampa Bay area of Florida. According to the Urban dictionary "Preppers" are people who focus on preparedness, generally for worst case scenarios. I am sure every prepper has had, at some time, that "light bulb" moment when something happen in their lives to make them recognize the need to be better prepared in the event of a catastrophe. Unfortunately some people have to live through a disastrous event to catch the vision. Thankfully for us our epiphany moment came in August of 1992 shortly after Hurricane Andrew tore through South Florida. As the magnitude of the storm became known throughout the region calls for help and assistance went out to communities in Florida that escaped damage from the hurricane. We responded to the calls for help and spent 2 weekends in the Homestead area assisting families in any way that we could. It is hard to describe the scene, thousands of acres of utter devastation. Nothing taller than 10 feet standing, trees, telephone poles, signs broken, snapped off or sheared by the force of the winds. Roofs blown off as far as the eye could see. No electricity, water, food or supplies for days. It looked like a bomb went off.

We returned home from that relief effort heartsick for the people in that area and with a resolve to make sure if something like that happen to us, we would be prepared to survive SUCCESSFULLY so that our families would not have to suffer. We both had small children at home and our concern for them motivated the desire to make sure we followed up on that commitment. It was not easy, budgets were tight, but we started small and kept at it.

Now our kids are grown and starting families of their own. We still worry about them and want them to be protected. Most live some distance from us so our concern is magnified by the inability to always "be there" for them. Through this blog we share with them what we have learned to help us all be better prepared and we invite you to join with us in starting to set aside that "ounce of prevention" just in case. We hope to provide some helpful insights as well as some entertaining dialogue during the journey. So let's start getting Preppy!