After Hurricane Katrina delivered a solid lashing, I sat with a household of teenagers, stricken at the horror of it all.
I wondered how the teenagers around me perceived the devastation. The kids were huddled close together, one curled tightly in a blanket, the others clinging side by side. I promised them that help was on the way. I wanted to reassure them that we were prepared for an emergency.
But that wasn’t the truth.
In my kitchen drawer there is a disaster preparation booklet. My daughter brought this home from school three-and-half years ago. When she brought it home, she made me promise to help her assemble an emergency kit in the garage of our house. It was a year after Sept. 11, and she was insistent that I pull it together to have a solid plan in place for our family.
The list of things in the 24-page booklet was daunting. I sat with her reviewing it and concluded we didn’t have most of the items in the house. She asked me to go out and buy the stuff, the way I buy groceries or gas for the car. She wanted it done within a week.
I worked out the expenses on scratch paper and explained that it would probably take me six months to be able to afford the entire list.
Six months was unacceptable to her. Six months could be never. Since I couldn’t afford the entire list in one shopping trip, I offered to buy something each week from the list until we had the kit assembled in our garage.
For six months she and I assembled the emergency disaster kit in the garage. Really, I did it to get her to stop nagging me. I wouldn’t have bought the stuff otherwise.
While I sat with the teens huddled around the news about Hurricane Katrina, I decided I had not really taken the disaster kit very seriously. Just off the top of my head I knew it didn’t have my daughter’s asthma medication, water purification tablets, phone numbers or a radio. I had only done a half-hearted effort three-and-half years ago, largely to appease my daughter.
I went into my kitchen drawer and pulled out the 24-page disaster preparation booklet. What seemed daunting three years ago, looks very sensible and well-thought-out to me now. I opened the book, that I never really read and saw to my dismay my daughter’s handwritten notes on every page of the book.
She had gone through every page of the book. She had listed my closest friends who were out of state to call along with their phone numbers. She had local emergency numbers for power and HAZMAT. Each page of the booklet has a checklist of things to know, things to have on hand. I quickly figured out her code, a checkmark meant we had it in the house, B meant to buy it, G meant it was in the garage.
On Page 7 it listed special items to remember for babies or others in the house. She wrote, no baby, but remember her sister’s asthma medicine.
I started to cry.
On Page 9 she had an evacuation floor plan of our house. The routes out were in easy to read red.
I thumbed back to the beginning of the booklet. On Page 2 she noted we should check on our elder neighbor, May, and take her with us if there was an emergency.
May has since passed away. Some of the phone numbers she has listed have changed. With my heart in my throat I realize it’s time to sit down with her and update this book.
Emergency preparedness plans can be downloaded from the Red Cross Web site, www.redcross.org.
Sarri Gilman is a freelance writer living on Whidbey Island. Her column on living with meaning and purpose runs every other Tuesday in The Herald. She is a therapist, a wife and a mother. You can e-mail her at features@heraldnet.com.
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