Your Preparedness Plan - When Disaster Strikes - page 31

Personal Items
Backup critical items off your computer onto DVDs or CDs
Digital copies of family photos, certificates, etc. onto DVDs or CDs
Digital copies of pictures of home, Including each room and personal possessions for insurance pur-
poses
(Source: Adapted from My Life in a Box: A Life Organizer by Laurie Ecklund Long, 2009)
Top Ten Survival Skills
The following is my top-ten list of skills and strategies most crucial to personal survival in a
disaster situation. I suggest you keep this list in mind while reading through the rest of this
topic, and while building your disaster preparation supplies and skill sets.
1. Be prepared . I strongly suggest that everyone put together a basic 72-hour grab-and-go survival
kit (see preceding section for a full list of items). This kit should cover the basic food, water, and
survival needs for you and your family for at least the critical first three days after a disaster. Most
of us could survive for a month without food, but a single day without water in extreme heat is
enough to kill a person. For planning ahead to cope with longer-term shortages, use the “OAR”
system (organize, acquire, and rotate) to stock up on supplies you may need, and keep them up to
date and viable (see chapters 3 and 4 ).
2. Develop your intuition. Most survivors credit their instincts and “gut feel” with saving their lives.
Natural selection has bred the most incredible survival mechanism into man. It is called “intu-
ition,” and primitive man has relied upon it for millennia to help him to make life-and-death de-
cisions in a split second. Unfortunately, our modern society places most of its emphasis on the
rational left-brain type of thinking, and for the most part ignores the intuitive right-brain type of
thinking. In chapter 7 , I teach the “Pit of the Stomach” exercise for intuitively testing potential
options before making a decision. It is best to practice these skills in your daily life, when the
consequences of your decisions are not usually life-and-death, rather than to wait until a crisis
comes along.
3. Have a disaster plan. See the preceding “Short-Term Preparedness Checklist.” Create a plan with
yourfamilyforcommunicatingandrespondingtoadisasterwhenphonelinesmaybedead(select
a predetermined local meeting area and out-of-town contact, know how to shut off your home's
gas and electricity supply, etc.).
4. Learn first aid. In the back country, as well as in most natural or manmade disasters, knowing fist
aid (including CPR) saves lives (see chapter 5 ) .
5. Go camping and backpacking. Most people have not camped or backpacked since they were kids,
or perhaps never at all. If you are in this category, start with some car camping for a few week-
ends. I suggest you get comfortable with car camping before graduating to overnight backpack-
ing trips. Backpacking will accustom your body to hiking several miles at a time and carrying
whatever you need yourself. When you have to carry everything on your own back, you learn
quickly what is necessary, and what you can do without. If you are an inexperienced “city slick-
er” and are thrust into a true survival situation, the experience will probably be quite painful, and
possibly deadly. My basic outdoor gear recommendations start on page 48.