Most natural disasters are hard to predict and are impossible to prevent. And many of them lead to human loss, financial and environmental troubles. However, most of these losses could be eliminated with proper emergency preparedness and emergency management.
Natural emergencies could be of many types. There could be land movements, earthquakes, eruptions, hurricanes, tornados, fires, floods and many other types of emergencies. Many natural disasters are related. Earthquakes may lead to tsunamis, eruptions could be followed by fires and so on. Many of them occur without any warnings. In many cases you will have to evacuate and leave your home. Are you ready to survive power outage, water and gas being cut off? You need to understand that emergency services are not able to help everyone during the first hours and even days after the disaster. This means you will have to survive on your own for a certain period of time.
And to make sure your family will survive an emergency you should involve emergency management and achieve emergency preparedness. Emergencies could never be put on hold. Emergency preparedness includes a plan of action that will increase your chances to survive a disaster. Each family, each school and each organization should have a good ad flexible emergency plan.
A good emergency plan should include safe exits from the building. You need to understand that your regular exits might be blocked. So it is important to make sure you have some additional exits like a back door or a window. Aside from that you need to set up a meeting place for your family and friends to get together during an emergency. If you have kids try to find a person who will be able to pick them up if you are unable to do so. If you have pets, make sure you have a safe place to leave them at (vet clinic and so on). Having a contact person which lives out of town is also a good idea. Local phone lines might be overloaded with calls during an emergency and you will have less problems calling long distance. Give the phone number of this person to all your family members including kids.
Make sure all your family members know how to use fire extinguisher. It is also important to teach your relatives to shut off gas and water in your house.
You should also understand that you might not be able to buy foods or other items during an emergency. That is why having at least 72 hour food and water supply is vital. This should be enough to survive most short term emergencies. But if you want to be able to survive long term ones, you need to get more food and water correspondingly.
Do you know that food storage can save you from lots of troubles during all sorts of emergency issues. Find out more about food storage on this food storage website.
