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Are you ready for the "Big
One"??? The best way for any of us to survive an earthquake is to have a plan, be prepared, and make sure that everyone close to you is on the proverbial same page. Create an emergency phone list and keep it in your wallet. You may not be able to charge your cell phone to have access to those numbers and you might not be at the same place as your personal phone book or day runner when the emergency strikes. Make sure your family has a copy of this list. People on this list should include at least one (if not more) out of the area contacts. If phone lines are down in the desert, having someone out of the area to call can keep you and yours in touch until you can all get together. If you have small children, laminate your list and put it in one of your child's shoes...make copies and put them in every pair if you can. Decide on a place to meet if a devastating earthquake strikes while everyone is at work and/or school.
We all learned in school to "duck & cover"
in an emergency, right? As an FYI, we've read a controversial article called
the
Triangle of Life on how to survive an earthquake that totally junks that
theory. The author has been slammed on Snopes.com for it, but some of the
theories make sense to us. We aren't going to tell you what to do, we're
just sharing information we've gotten - you can and must make your own
decision about what to do. Although gas is outrageously expensive, don't let your car get less than half full. If you have to leave the desert, you want to make sure you have enough gas to get where you're going. Gas pumps won't work if there's no power.
Create a spot in your garage, next to
an exterior wall, where you can stockpile emergency supplies. Use tubs with
lids and stack it/them on the sturdiest metal rack you can afford. If walls
collapse, you won't have as much rubble to sift through to get to your
things & the rack should protect the tubs from being crushed. Because I (Halle) was a Girl Scout leader for so many years, I got into being prepared for pretty much anything that a bunch of young girls could do. I took my troop camping often enough to learn what was necessary to their (and my) survival. George & I looked at all my packing lists and found that most everything I needed while camping was basically the best stuff to keep in our survival box. Of course there's a few extras that would be overkill on a camping trip... Here's our list of "must haves" in our survival box:
Cash - in small denominations and as much as
you can afford to put aside. If our electricity goes kaputsky, so do ATM's,
cash registers, etc.
More "must haves" will be posted shortly -
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