Can I get a redo?

Photo: Failed by VCTStyle

There are three stages to emergency planning: preparation, the event, and recovery. In June I blogged about how to prepare psychologically for the recovery stage of an emergency or disaster. Now I’m wondering how to prepare psychologically for the event itself.

Hypothetical situation: it’s a sunny, warm summer day. This month is the driest on record for your city. One evening around dinnertime you look out the front window and find a raging river of mud has taken over your street.

Do you:

1. Throw on your bathing suit and flip flops and go wading with all the kids?
2. Grab your camera and start taking pictures?
3. Text your BF to come over and enjoy the spectacle?
4. Hide under your bed until it’s all over?
5. See if you still have fresh water and fill up every large container in your house in case supply is disrupted?

Any answer but #5 is a fail. What did I do? I grabbed my camera and took pictures. When neighbours emerged from their houses to look at it with me, I enjoyed a social moment. Then and only then did I go inside and start doing what I should have done at the outset.

I’ve been a safety warden in an office tower and had the helmet and flashlight to prove it. I’ve trained to prepare properties for bushfires with Fire & Rescue New South Wales. I’ve taken emergency preparedness courses with North Shore Emergency Management teams. It feels like I should have responded more sensibly.

One good thing – it was only a ruptured water main. The District of North Vancouver moved its crews in quickly and cleared the mess. But in a true disaster, like a major earthquake, there won’t be nearly enough resources to go around. That river of mud and debris would signal our drinking water running down to the sea with no hope of recovering it.

The risk of thinking about disasters is that we may only prepare for recovery. Is there any way to prepare for the event itself? I’m not sure. I like to think of Tuesday’s event as a dress rehearsal where the result came back must try harder.

Have you ever been in an emergency situation where you wish you’d responded more proactively? Or have you ever done exactly what you should have done and felt that sense of being in control, as much as being in control is possible in an emergency or disaster situation? 

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Photo by Maggie Bolitho

In the beginning

I'm terrified of earthquakes. I grew up in Victoria BC where we experienced an occasional temblor or two, frequently enough to remind us how vulnerable we were.

When I moved to Australia, I put that worry behind me. Instead I learned to respect the terrible might of bushfires. Our house was built on a ridge, looking down over 10,000 acres of national park. I became a volunteer firefighter (CFU) and learned to sleep with one ear open during bushfire season.

Then I moved back to Canada and my husband and I bought a house on the side of Mount Fromme. We now live perched on top of the Pacific Ring of Fire. It's not a matter of if a major quake will ever shake the Pacific Northwest, it's a question of when. Geological time is vast, though, and it may not happen for another thousand years.

Or it could happen today, as I sit here typing. I started thinking that way a couple of years ago and that's when the idea for my novel Lockdown was born. I wanted to go some place that really frightened me and in writing this book, I found it.

My novel will be released by Great Plains Publishing early in 2014 and until then, I'm going to explore my fascination with earthquakes on this blog.

Welcome to my nightmare.

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Photo: Christchurch, March 2011 by BluesandViews