Emergencies
Prepare Now to Protect Yourself, Your Family and Your Home from Emergencies
Emergency Supplies and Kits
Why are 72 Hour Kits so important?
Preparing for Emergencies
It's not easy preparing for emergencies, and that's partly because we simply don't know how we would react if we faced some kind of disaster. However, a lot of evidence shows that proper preparation really helps.
I've been reading a fascinating book called The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes -- and Why by Amanda Ripley. At first I thought it might be just an imitation version of The Survivors Club: The Secrets and Science that Could Save Your Life by Ben Sherwood. Instead I found that it's a terrific complement to that book.
There's a lot of overlap, she Ripley focuses on major disasters rather than cases of people who survive extraordinary circumstances but usually (though not always) by themselves. She delves into cases of widespread death.
Like Sherwood, she undertakes a lot of personal research, going through an airplane crash survival class with some flight attendants and have her brain scanned. She interviewed scientists who have studied crowds and how fear affects us. Plus, she interviewed people who survived large scale disasters and uses their cases to examine general trends.
For instance, she found a woman who survived both terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City. She was stuck in an elevator when the first bomb there blew up in 1993. On September 11, 2001 she was on a high floor and is a study in how people there typically reacted.
Do you think people immediately rushed to the stairwells and started jumping down the steps? Not all all. They turned off their computers. They milled around and talked it over. Many of them didn't know where their stairwells were. They made thousands of phone calls. When they finally got into the stairwells, they descended at a leisurely, relaxed pace.
The woman Ripley profiled was a fire marshall for her floor, but she hadn't been trained, and she totally forgot about that title until months later. Besides, nobody gave her additional instructions. Even when she reached the bottom, she needed someone to get her all the way out.
Of course, at first people didn't know what had happened. And even when they learned a jet had crashed into the buildings, they didn't think that would bring the towers crashing down.
Yes, they'd had fire drills, where they just left their offices and stood around in the hall chatting. They never practiced exiting the entire building.
But people who'd been through disasters before, were better able to cope. One man who survived a tragic plane crash got out fast because when he was a child he was in a building fire. Ever since, he always checked out the exits of every strange he went to. So when the plane crashed, he knew where to go.
She doesn't give the extensive airplane survival tips that Sherwood does, but does point the importance of educating yourself. In one plane crash, the only survivors were those who had a paid attention to the emergency briefing that so many people (myself included) ignore. They were the ones who read the little cards telling you what to do.
So make sure you and your family practice preparing for emergencies.