Your Preparedness Plan - When Disaster Strikes - page 18

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Your Preparedness Plan
“ Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear,
do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy. ” —Dale Carnegie
We are living in an era of economic upheaval, super storms, record-breaking droughts and
floods, international terrorism, global food shortages, and increasingly destructive earthquakes.
It appears quite likely that at some point in the not-too-distant future many of us will experien-
ce significant disruptions in central services, basic utilities such as electricity, and access to
whatever you desire from local stores. Remember that when electricity stops flowing, furnaces,
cash registers, gasoline pumps, refrigerators, elevators, phones, and air conditioners all stop
working, except for the rare facilities that are hooked up to a backup source of power. Without
gas and electricity, most municipal water-treatment and waste-removal systems will soon shut
down, and emergency medical services are usually quite limited. If the power goes out when
temperatures are well below freezing, without a backup source of heat (or drained and winter-
ized plumbing) the toilet bowls and pipes in most modern homes will start to freeze and will
burst within one or two days.
This chapter helps you to formulate your personalized preparedness plan, and to put togeth-
er the basic supplies you will need to weather short-term emergencies, such as a 72-hour “grab-
and-go” survival kit and a comprehensive first-aid kit. It also provides suggestions for compil-
ing critical information and records in one single location, so they may be grabbed on a mo-
ment's notice if an unexpected evacuation is required. The chapter ends with my top-ten list of
important survival skills and strategies.
Are You Prepared?
As mentioned in chapter 1 , emergency preparedness isn't about a bunch of survivalists crawl-
ing around in the woods, preparing to fight off the starving hordes in some grim, post-9/11,
apocalyptic fantasy. In today's world of terrorist acts, global warming, and super storms, there