As you’ve seen from various disasters, no one can stand alone, everyone needs help. the same is true of man made disasters. We need to band together and make sure we have others with disparate skills in our teams.
I encourage you now, while it’s still “light” to do just that. First steps are simple. Take a simple spreadsheet like below and start there:
| First name | Phone | City | County | |
This will allow you to start holding your first meetings for collaboration. What would you discuss or collaborate on? Start with alternate communications. If power goes out, you have no cells, no phones, no email…so having knowledge or use of a hand held radio would be a great first step. BaoFeng (see amazon.com) makes a great handheld ham radio set for $79/2 of them. Likewise, Motorola and Ericsson make those 15-20 mile radios. There’s also band skipping radios (programmable by pair) so you can have secure communications…those are about $239/ea. Keeping them charged get a simple 30w solar panel with a Duracell 600D storage battery…you’ll be able to keep simple light or two and your comms up and running.
Secondly, self-defense, look what happened in Watts, CA after the Rodney King trials didn’t go the way of others wishes…take time and make sure you’re able to defend yourself and your loved ones. Organizing group training makes this more fun and helps those less knowledgeable become better at this. A story from that event, a friend of mine, retired marine, had to go extract his son from college…he had his .45 with him…he had to pull it twice, but never had to use it…nuff said.
Thirdly, food and water, what do you have? The govt says, 3 days, 3 ways…I think that’s hugely better than most folks, but not anywhere near what you need. Look how many months it took to get assistance with hurricane Sandy and Katrina…the govt isn’t going to be there to help. Building a stock of 2-3 mos of water (1-2 gal per person) and food is a great first step. You can even go quickly and get a “Water Bob” from amazon.com. It’s a last minute contingency in an event. So say hurricane hits…or earthquake…and we still have water pressure…quickly deploy the Bob to the bathtub fill it and you have over 60 gallons of water (one person 30 days)…two tubs…2 people, etc. $35 on Amazon.com
In future articles, we’ll explore more but for now, how’s that call tree coming?