Charles R. Crooks

Shaman, Healer of Hearts and Minds

(214) 923-5848

Dec 31, 2018

 

Emergency Preparedness

 

Many of you may not know this, but I worked for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department Disaster Communications Group from 1985 to 1991 and the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Emergency Services Department from 1991 to 1992, and from 1992 to 2011, the City of Richardson in Texas Emergency Communications group. I still provide emergency communications though the Amateur Emergency Radio Service to this day. 

I was the District Communications Officer for Lakewood, California Sheriff’s Sub- Station Thirteen, which was responsible for five cities and about one hundred fifty Red Cross volunteers. Further, during this time I also worked at the Communications Information Center for the County of Los Angeles covering twenty-six Substations. I received training in Sheriff’s Department Communications and Los Angeles County fire Department communications. Furthermore, I attended eight courses from the Menlo Park California emergency response Institute.  These classes included, Incident Command System, Mutual Aid in Disaster Management, Responsibilities of the Emergency Coordinator, Disaster Stress Management, Working with Government Officials, Volunteers Management, Conducting Drills and Exercises, and Public Service Events.

Part of my responsibilities as a District Communications Officer was to provide training for approximately, one hundred volunteers. I have worked onsite and in remote locations covering events from passenger plane crashes, to search and rescue, earthquake recovery, and the Long Beach and Los Angeles Riots events. The other planned operations included the Rose Parade, Los Angeles Marathon, Pasadena Doo-Dah Parade, and a few others.

The reason I am bringing this information forward has to do with establishing a certain background with the intent of giving you the reader some good practices as far as emergency preparedness are concerned.

So let us examine the items each of you should have in the trunk of your car and in your home. Nevertheless, to establish this we first must look at the first thing that will fail during an earthquake and/or other disaster man-made or otherwise. That would be your cell phone. While in most cities the average cell phone has access to two or three towers, all it takes is one of those towers to be out of alignment and cell phone communication will be impossible. For example, in Southern California it was a known fact that the microwave system used by the Sheriff and most if not all Los Angeles and Orange County police departments would immediately fail if a reasonably large earthquake came through the area. By California standards, a 6.5 or 7.0 would be considered reasonably large. However, thanks to the building codes, many of the buildings will still survive. This type of movement will also cause the misalignment of the microwave towers, which are the primary links for Cell Phone Communications and of other communication systems causing losses therein throughout the County. Furthermore when such an event occurs,  everybody in the whole county will pick up their cell phones at once and try to contact their loved ones overloading the system.  This was a problem before cell phones and still exists today. The phone companies figured out is the number of anticipated people on the system and built that system to meet or slightly exceed those numbers.

 

To address this particular issue it is good to have a two-way radio.  There are very useful You Tube videos regarding the pros and cons of various radio systems. 

 

Once you read the article and some of the reviews, you will find that most radios in the city environment are good 3 to 8 miles and in an environment where there are no obstructions up to around 20 miles. 

 

The next option in communication would be the satellite transceivers available through various retailers like REI. For example, when I am out hiking in the boonies and there is no cell phone service, I know I can push a button on my Spot satellite transmitter. Once one of the buttons are pushed the device will send a general message and GPS location, a query request message and GPS location, and/or an SOS Emergency message, which will automatically alert emergency services in the area that I am hiking.  Furthermore, the device will let you know that the message has successfully been transmitted reaching the satellite. They also have a satellite phone, which is also available.

 

Turns out, they are currently on Sale for about 50% off their regular price.   From the website, they are now at 6,217 rescues use the Spot satellite tracker.

 

Now the second thing to consider would be some emergency supplies for your automobile and an escape bag near one of your doors at your home or apartment in a place easy to get to so if you have to leave in a hurry so you can pick it up and away you go.

 

The rule of thumb is to have at least three days food of water minimum in your car. If you are in the colder climates have not one but two or three fire sources including emergency blankets, etc. and if you are in drier climates such as desert, raise your water amount from three days to five. It is also good rule of thumb to have at least one hundred dollars in cash (five, ten or twenty dollar bills) in your escape bag and another hundred dollars in cash and in your car. You want to keep the denomination small for safety reasons. Flipping out a hundred dollar bill in an emergency may be too tempting for many people. The reason for this most if not all of the bank ATMs will not be working, and most if not all of the credit card machines in the area will also not be working.

 

The next item on our list would have to do with establishing meeting places were all family members go. If the primary meeting place were not available, a secondary meeting place would need to be on the list.  It is also very important to have a person to contact out of the area for status updates of other family members.

 

As far as emergency food supplies, there appears to be some good deals via Costco regarding Wise food systems. I know these are also available via other retailers online and can keep the family fed for a reasonable amount of time.

 

Regarding freshwater, there are many systems out there available to campers and others, which are filtered straws and will pretty will filter out just about anything you can think of. Many of these you can actually put in your pocket and uses as a straw if you need to drink some water that may be questionable. The neat thing about these items is they are efficient and inexpensive. You will find these at various outlets such as REI or Cabela’s, and like most the things I have talked about today are available via Amazon.

 

There are several ways to store water in relatively small containers. However, strongly warn you against storing water in those gray plastic containers that you find in the stores.  These containers are weak and are famous for developing holes and cracking therefore leaking the contents out. If you need to store water in smaller containers unbelievably the easiest and cheapest container to use that is rugged and can be kick from one end of the street to the other is a 2 L clear soda bottle. 

 

You are probably wondering why am bringing this particular material up at the beginning of the year. Well, the ring of fire has been little bit more active recently causing some volcanic and earthquakes activities over around Indonesia. Well eventually large tectonic plates starts moving a little bit on one side and the other side will probably act up a sometime later. The key here is to pay attention to what is going.  After all, a little bit of prep will save you a lot of heartache in the future.

 

In the bonds of the work I am,

 

Charles

 

All original material is © Copyright 2003-2019 Charles R Crooks All Rights Reserved

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