A Great Deal of Thought went into Your Decision to Locate to your Particular Area. How Well Do You Know Your Area from an Emergency Perspective?
Preparedness is often associated with emergency supplies, generators, flashlights, food, water, and first-aid kits. Those things matter. But there are other parts of preparedness that can easily be overlooked
Knowing your surroundings can become just as important as knowing what is stored in your emergency kit. When a serious emergency develops, you may need to make decisions quickly. Understanding risks, resources, roads, and history of your area before an emergency can guide decisions. Moreover, know your area guides your actions.
Use this link to find out how your area is classified: https://msc.fema.gov/portal/search
Flooding does not only affect homes located immediately beside rivers and streams. Heavy rainfall, overwhelmed drainage systems, flash flooding, dam or levee problems, and rapidly rising waterways can create hazards in places people may not normally associate with flooding.
Ask yourself:
Could flooding prevent you from reaching a hospital, workplace, family member, or evacuation route?
Most importantly, if your normal route became impassable, what is your alternate route?
Knowing that answer before an emergency is far better than trying to determine it while conditions are deteriorating.
Where Will You Go for Medical Help?
Know your area
Most people probably know your area and where their nearest hospital is. Additionally, preparedness requires going a little further.
Where is your second-closest hospital?
Where are the nearest emergency clinics or urgent-care facilities?
Which facilities operate around the clock?
What routes can you use to reach them?
An emergency can make the shortest route unusable. Floodwater, storm damage, fallen trees, power lines, traffic accidents, fires, or emergency road closures can completely change how you reach medical assistance.
Your preparedness information should therefore include primary and alternate medical facilities and more than one way to reach them.
Know your area highways
However, how well do you know the highways leaving your area?
If conditions become unsafe enough that you need to leave, where will you go?
Knowing the highway system surrounding your community is an important part of evacuation planning. Identify the major highways and secondary roads that can take you away from your area in different directions.
Then consider another question:
Where are your potential safe retreats?
These might include the homes of relatives or friends, designated shelters, hotels, campgrounds, neighboring communities, or other predetermined locations outside the affected area.
Don’t build your entire evacuation plan around one destination and one highway.
A major emergency could affect thousands of people simultaneously. Roads may become congested or closed. Bridges may be inaccessible. Fuel may become difficult to obtain.
Have alternatives.
Do You Know Your Area’s Severe Weather History?
History cannot tell us exactly what the next emergency will be, but it can tell us a great deal about what has happened before.
What types of severe weather have affected your community?
Tornadoes?
Hurricanes or tropical systems?
Flash floods?
Severe thunderstorms?
Extreme heat or cold?
Winter storms?
Extended power outages?
Look beyond the last year or two. New residents in particular may have little firsthand knowledge of significant events that occurred ten, twenty, or fifty years ago.
Understanding that history can help you recognize which hazards deserve additional attention in your family’s or business’s emergency planning.
Know Your Community’s Emergency History
Weather is only part of the picture.
Consider other emergencies that have affected your community or surrounding region. Major fires, hazardous-material incidents, transportation accidents, prolonged utility failures, industrial emergencies, infrastructure failures, and other events can reveal vulnerabilities that may still exist today.
Ask longtime residents what they remember. Research past events. Pay attention to the locations where incidents occurred and how transportation, utilities, medical services, and normal community activities were affected.
The purpose is not to live in fear of past disasters.
The purpose is to learn from them.
Turn Knowledge into a Personal Area Assessment.
Take some time to create a simple emergency assessment of the area surrounding your home or business.
Identify your primary hazards, flood concerns, nearby medical facilities, emergency services, evacuation highways, secondary roads, potential safe destinations, and alternate routes.
Then ask one more question about every one of these questions:
How am I going to integrate this knowledge into my plan?
A plan helps you decide what to do.
But understanding the environment around you helps you recognize where the danger may come from, where help may be available, and where you can go when remaining in place is no longer the safest choice. There are many other considerations that will be become a part of your overall plan. Hopefully these basic questions will provoke thought and begin the thought process in overall planning.
Preparedness begins long before an emergency occurs.
Know your risks. Know your resources. Know your routes. Know your alternatives.
Gulsby Consulting — Building resilience through preparedness.