estro

Thanks to NPR for reminding me.

4 years ago yesterday I had headed down to Santa Cruz to help a former housemate move and we spent large portions of the day watching to the weather channel while packing: There was a CAT 5 in the Gulf of Mexico, and it was headed for New Orleans.

What still angers and boggles me today is that if two Santa Cruzers and one me knew this was going to be devastating, how the fuck did the Federal Government not have it figured out?

As we all know, despite lessening to a CAT 3, and not hitting the Big Easy dead on, New Orleans and the Gulf Coast got brutally smashed, and the lack of effective Federal action was the largest factor in much of the death, suffering, and continued destruction in the following weeks. And those of you who have been down that way to visit or volunteer tell me that the area still hasn't recovered.

Despite a shiny new administration, there are still many places that have the potential to become the next New Orleans in a disaster, natural or otherwise. Floods, fires, tornadoes: pick your region, pick your poison. Even though I know this; as I sit in the shade, waiting for my very late train, watching folk head to the Eat Real festival on the waterfront it is hard to remember that I live in one such place. And, as a region, we have become as lax in the preparation for our "The Big One" as New Orleans had been before Katrina.

I am one of the more prepared locals I know, and I still haven't gotten around to completing Oakland's CORE training (though I did crash most of Berkeley's equivalent classes), nor have I managed the time or funds to take one of the Red Crosses' first aid cert classes, and my earthquake box is woefully under-packed (my crowbar wandered over to xthread's, I haven't restocked the foodstuffs since my last really broke n' hungry cycle, and I have no idea where half of the first aid stuff went), While I have talked to some of my neighbors, I haven' t gotten around to organizing a neighborhood preparedness class.

So, as an exercise, think about what you would do in your flavor of likely local disaster, and about how prepared you and your community are to handle that.

It is all fun and games until a building falls on you.

This fault runs within four or five miles of almost all eastbay residents.

I live in a neighborhood of mostly older apartment buildings, on what used to be marshland, and I am pretty damn sure that I am one of the few people in my neighborhood that has any emergency preparedness supplies.

Heh. As I am also on the first floor, all my stuff is going to be buried under the rest of the building anyway. *sigh*