Tag Archives: plan

Creating Your Work Evacuation Plan

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But I’m Working Now 

As much as we’d like to, we don’t get to choose our disaster or where we will be when it strikes. Best case: entire family home together with all our ‘stuff’ available; worst case: stuck in an airport, alone, with none of your preps. How about something in between, what if you’re at work?

Remember school fire drills? We’d all neatly file from our classrooms with the teacher leading us, like a mommy duck, to our designated spot in the playground. They’d take roll to account for everyone; that’d be reported to the principal, then we’d all file back inside.

Fast forward to today where you’re sitting at work. Something is wrong and you have to evacuate. It’s not a drill, there’s no teacher to lead you, or principal to account for you. Hopefully you know how to safely evacuate your own building, but what next? We’re all grown up now; we must have our own plan of what to do if an emergency occurs when we’re at work.

This is another one of those things where I can’t tell you what to do; you’ll have to develop your own plan. But I can tell you what Sarah and I have planned, and our contingencies.

Sarah and I both work in Seattle (about 45 miles from our home). Ironically we only work about a mile apart. Sarah commutes on the train working traditional hours. I drive to work and have a ‘non-traditional’ schedule. Each week there are three days we both work there (but only in the afternoons), two days she’s in Seattle alone, and one day only I’m there. We’ve had to come up with multiple plans that vary based on the day of the week.

So if we’re both there, she would come up the hill to where I work. My workplace is more secure, further from the water, and away from the downtown congested high-rise area. In case I have to leave work also, we’ve discussed what street she would walk up and what side of the street she would be on. We have contingency plans of where to meet if we both had to leave and we didn’t (or couldn’t) meet up on that street. If it’s only me, since I drive I have my car and BOB; I also have friends I could stay with in the area if necessary. If only she is there, she’ll make the decision if it’s okay to take the train home, or if it’d be better to stay at a predetermined friend’s home in the area. She also has a family member who works near her (and who drives to work) and has made plans of where to meet and try to get somewhere safer together.

Also since Sarah rides to work on public transportation, everything she has for the day is in her backpack. In addition to her normal work stuff, she has a miniature version of her BOB; she also wears good walking shoes back and forth to work. At work she keeps extra water, food, and a change of clothes.

We’ve also discussed communication:

  • if cell phones aren’t getting through, we’ll try a landline
  • if “all circuits are busy”, we’ll try a predetermined long-distance relative
  • if landlines don’t work, we’ll try texting (texts frequently go through even when voice calls don’t)
  • if texting doesn’t work, we’ll try email (if necessary, moving to a wireless area to email on the phone)
  • if none of those options are available, we have a predetermined place to leave a written note

Of course all the “what ifs” can’t be covered. The important thing is to take the time to think about what you’d do if an emergency happened when you were at work. Then develop and discuss your plan with family members. It costs nothing and, in this crazy world we live in today, it’s one less thing to worry about.

(Wednesday: Never Buy A Replacement Blade)

Becoming Mentally & Physically Prepared

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Buying Stuff Is Easy

“Mental and physical preparation. People die with all of the things they need to survive because they don’t maintain the will to survive. . . . the most important thing is the person using the technology.” This was recently emailed to me by one of my oldest and closest friends. In the military they taught us: improvise, adapt, and overcome. Knowledge and ability, once gained, are yours forever; stuff can be lost, broken, or taken away.

Though few of us can buy everything we’d like, the actual concept of saving up the money, going to the store, selecting, paying, and bringing it home is easy. It’s easy and we feel good because we now have this item; we believed we needed it for our preps, we saved for it, and now own it. But this is only a start, now we have to mentally and physically develop the skill set to use it. New items typically fall into one of two categories: it is something we are already familiar with and just need to figure out the new one, or it’s something we’ve never used before and need to learn a brand new skill (which take time and effort).

Mental preparation: developing a survival/can-do attitude and learning useful skill sets. Physical preparation: keeping yourself physically capable of surviving and accomplishing those skill sets.

We all have stuff sitting around our homes that we’ve bought but really don’t know how to use. We understand the basic concept and we’re fairly confident that if we needed to we could “figure it out”, but we haven’t taken the time to – yet. This can be a precarious position. Now that we’ve bought said item we feel we have checked off that box; there are other new and interesting things, to buy. Figuring it out “one of these days” frequently never quite happens.

It is imperative that we do “figure it out”. Take the time to learn the skill, then get your hands dirty and practice it – watching a video isn’t good enough. For example, It’s easy to buy a few 2x4s, some dirt, and a few seed packets; that is most everything needed to build and plant a raised bed garden. But how many more steps are there between buying and harvesting healthy vegetables?

What about the generator we’ve been told we need? Home generators are relatively simple to operate: add fuel, open fuel lines, choke, turn on, pull starter, and it should fire up. But, doing this for the first time in the dark is not simple nor stress-free. (That is not the time to realize you never stored any fuel.) What are you going to power with it, why, and for how long? Take the time to figure it out before the power fails. Consider developing your skill set further–and here I need to take my own advice–and learn some basic maintenance.

Or, one of the common prepper flaws: owning lots of guns, lots of ammo, and never having taking a defensive firearms course. “I know how to shoot” many will say, but how about shooting effectively in a high stress, low light, fatigue filled situation, where people might be hurt? Sure you can shoot the center out of the paper targets every time. Sure you assume that if the SHTF you’ll be just fine. But have you ever practiced for failure? What have you really done to mentally and physically prepare the skill set that could protect your family?

The list continues. You have the great BOB; can you carry it? Sure it’s in a quality backpack, but have you put it on, cinched it up and walked any distance? What about good footwear? You bought good boots; but finding out they needed breaking in when you are a mile into your ten-mile trek, is too late.

It was easy to buy it, but investing the time to learn new things, with our busy schedules and hectic lives, is tough – really tough. Especially when it all has to be self-motivated, there’s no ‘financial’ return, and you’re learning it for something that might happen, someday, maybe. So how do we self motivate? ‘Because we should’ isn’t (usually) good enough. Everyone knows they should exercise, eat right, etc. but you need to be able to articulate your own reason and goal.

I don’t have any brilliant insights to give you. You have to find that motivation; start with your plan. Set short-term achievable goals, working toward a reachable long-term goal; continue to eat that elephant “one bite at a time.” Begin with the Five Basic Needs and build from there. Yes, there are certain things you have to ‘get’, but, more importantly, you have to develop the skills to utilize those things and prepare yourself mentally and physically for the tasks that may be ahead.

(Wednesday: A List)