I know what the easy cure is...
Oct. 29th, 2012 05:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psybelle... but I'm still kind of enthralled/overwhelmed by the disaster pr0n coming from the East Coast. I really need not to be looking at this shit when it brings back memories of the San Jose floods (wading out through crotch-deep water when we finally decided to evacuate, and I don't think we ever saw the end of the silt flakes coming out of the ventilation system of the Toyota) and mild PTSD from Loma Prieta.
The easy cure is to not look, the harder one is non-attachment - everything passes. Working on that, but I really like my stuff, dammit... And at the same time, yes - everything passes - but there's no point to being stupid/fatalistic about it all.
Yes, shit happens. Storms happen, floods happen, earthquakes happen. We can't do a thing about any of that. What we can do is take a few simple steps to maximize our ability to respond flexibly to disasters, take a few steps to minimize the burden we might place on a stressed infrastructure and any governmental disaster-response mechanisms.
So... thought experiment time.
The most likely large-scale local disaster is earthquake. Given that we have no local Fukushima Reactor to worry about, the decision to shelter-in-place or bug out *might* need to be made building-by-building...
If the immediate decision is to shelter in place, 3 days worth of supplies is the bare minimum. A week is a good idea... and I don't have that much water on hand for myself and the cats. Need to fix that, water's cheap. Calories for me is iffy, if there's no gas to cook with (don't have a cookstove). I have a couple days' worth, but not a week or more of room-temperature consumables.
If the immediate decision is to leave the apartment, then there's a whole bunch of decisions that don't make a neat tree. Do I take the cats or just put out food and water? (Is it even going to be possible to find and crate them for transport??) I have a go-bag with some calories, current meds, flashlight and radio, other miscellaneous stuff... do I know where I'm going? (kinda - as a NERT volunteer, there are meeting places and such set up - some structure in place.)
need to poke at this some more...
The easy cure is to not look, the harder one is non-attachment - everything passes. Working on that, but I really like my stuff, dammit... And at the same time, yes - everything passes - but there's no point to being stupid/fatalistic about it all.
Yes, shit happens. Storms happen, floods happen, earthquakes happen. We can't do a thing about any of that. What we can do is take a few simple steps to maximize our ability to respond flexibly to disasters, take a few steps to minimize the burden we might place on a stressed infrastructure and any governmental disaster-response mechanisms.
So... thought experiment time.
The most likely large-scale local disaster is earthquake. Given that we have no local Fukushima Reactor to worry about, the decision to shelter-in-place or bug out *might* need to be made building-by-building...
If the immediate decision is to shelter in place, 3 days worth of supplies is the bare minimum. A week is a good idea... and I don't have that much water on hand for myself and the cats. Need to fix that, water's cheap. Calories for me is iffy, if there's no gas to cook with (don't have a cookstove). I have a couple days' worth, but not a week or more of room-temperature consumables.
If the immediate decision is to leave the apartment, then there's a whole bunch of decisions that don't make a neat tree. Do I take the cats or just put out food and water? (Is it even going to be possible to find and crate them for transport??) I have a go-bag with some calories, current meds, flashlight and radio, other miscellaneous stuff... do I know where I'm going? (kinda - as a NERT volunteer, there are meeting places and such set up - some structure in place.)
need to poke at this some more...