Are you prepared? If the recent TV pictures of the Haiti earthquake and the heavy rain storms in California don’t scare you into getting prepared, I don’t know what other message it might take to convince you to “Be Prepared” to be on your own for 72 hours or longer.
Up until now, our local CERT and COPE volunteers have usually started their presentations by saying, We’re not here to scare you, but to prepare you. Maybe it’s time to reverse these words, as we did above. Another way to state it is, “If you fail to get ready to cope with a severe earthquake, the recovery period will be scary.”
The key questions you and your neighbors should ask, and they have been asked ever since we started this theme with Our Cyberplace blog #5 (3/21/06), titled CERT Training may be found on the Neighborhood Emergency Response Team(NERT) website, http://www.petalumanert.org Look on the left side of the home page and click on Ready America, and learn how to (a) Get a Kit, (b) Make a Plan, and (c) Be Informed. It’s as easy as learning your A, B, C’s.
Here we are four years later, after 65 blogs have been posted on Petaluma360, dealing with “Disaster Readiness” and “Emergency Preparedness” issues and concerns – what has been accomplished locally? Are the majority of homes in Petaluma ready? Have our neighborhoods organized any type of emergency response teams? Have they created any kind of emergency radio network.
Take a look at Our Cyberplace blog #5– Emergency Preparedness (3/22/06) and #6- Are You Prepared? (3/23/06). Nothing has changed. The basic message is still the same. The real question is: Have you and your neighbors “changed?”
Remember this acronym for 2010 – WOOO! We’re On Our Own!
*Note: If you wade through the blogs indexed in the right-hand column, you’ll find a total of 65 previous posts as follows: 23 in the year 2006, 25 in 2007, 11 in 2008, 6 in 2009, and 1 in 2010. The Trio is working on getting them organized under the Category headings: Our Cyberplace (6); Then & Now (3); Our Petaluma (3); Bill’s Blog (8), and Emergency Preparedness (46).