Ten Tips to Ready Oneself for Disasters
Natural disasters, wars, “terrorist” attacks, virus outbreaks are everywhere. Time will tell which of these you will experience because these disasters are an inescapable part of the world. When it happens, there is nothing we can do to stop it but we can make sure that we prepare ourselves for it. Making at least some preparation is better than none and the following tips is a good start.
1. Make up an Emergency Plan
This is the best thing you can do to prepare for an emergency. Whatever situation you can think of, make sure you have a plan for it. Your survival kit should be in place where it easy to remember and accessible. Keeping a small survival pack in your car helps you deal with disasters if they happen while you’re on the road. Everyone involved should know what the plan is but you can go a step further by performing drills.
2. First Aid Kit
Ready made medical emergency kits are a good place to start but be sure to keep building your kit until it is complete. Start with the professional version of the medical emergency kit and pay attention to what’s included in the kit.
For instance, if the medical kit has only one snakebite kit, you might want to add another one; the same goes for bandages. When it comes to emergency preparedness, there’s no such thing as “too much”, and in cases of natural disasters such as hurricanes, it’s easy to get scratches and cuts that can become infected. Always buy extra bandages and antiseptic wipes for better protection.
3. Knowing First Aid
All that time and money to build an emergency kit won’t do any good if you don’t know how to use them. To help you gain knowledge, courses on CPR, First Aid and AED are offered by the Red Cross. Other recommended ones are injury prevention courses, blood borne pathogens training and community disaster education. These courses can – literally – save a life.
4. Stock Up on Drinking Water
Although drinking water seems to be in generous supply, the same cannot be said in emergencies. Replace the water with fresher ones every three months and use a strong durable container. If you’re certain a difficult situation is building up, fill up all your water containers.
The European Union have announced that it will ban iodine for use in disinfecting drinking water. It will no longer be an option for many people.
5. Food
Make sure you have different types of food in your stock to cater for time when you can’t heat up your food. A good preparation can enable you to eat hot food most of the time if not every time.
6. Cooking
In a an emergency situation, you might not have access to your normal stove to cook. I recommend portable propane stoves because they’re easy to use. To help your body regulate your temperature in cold weather and to keep your body nourished you need hot food. Make sure you add one to your emergency preparations; hot food can help keep your body nourished, as well as help regulate your temperature during colder weather.
7. Replacement Lights
In natural disasters, you most likely to lose power so you alternative source of light. If your light source is battery operated stock up the right kind of battery. However, depending on how long you’re out of power, light sticks are excellent choices. Since light sticks are cheap, get several of them. They’re a very option for emergency lighting and come in varying lengths of hours.
8. Tool Kit for Emergencies
Depending on the situation, you might need some tools to accomplish some stuff like cut wood for fuel, make repairs, dig a hole etc. A multi-tool may be able to do a lot of stuff but it may not up to the task for some stuff.
9. Emergency Radio
In any type of natural emergency, you need to be able to keep up with the news and weather reports. Radios are an age-old tradition, but technology has made them even more versatile for emergencies. Radio that can be plugged-in may be nice but once you lose power you in trouble.
10. Guides
There are a lot of useful tips you can get from survial guides. Check with other guides to see if the informatoin has at least some truth in it. Pay particular on the part about foraging. There are thousands of deaths in a free because of eating poisonous food in the wild.
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