By: Jim Taylor
Preparation for emergencies
starts at home
We have just finished national
Emergency Preparedness Week. I’ll bet you didn’t do a fire drill in your home.
Schools have regular fire
drills. Office towers are supposed to have them – although in the 13 years I
worked in one, I can only remember one fire drill.
Cruise lines always have an
emergency drill, to ensure that passengers know where to find life jackets, and
how to get to their lifeboat station.
But I’ve yet to experience a
similar emergency drill on BC Ferries. Perhaps they
still believe their ships never sink.
Hotels post signs in every
room, defining escape routes and procedures. I have never seen one in a private
home.
Yet every week, it seems, our newspapers
report house or apartment fires.
Unreadiness everywhere
Recently, two members of our fire department have been
talking to community organizations about their SAFE
program, hoping they might save a life before emergency strikes.
Their research indicates that
only one in 20 homes has even talked about fire escape plans, and none have
actually practiced it.
The facts are frightening. If
there’s a fire in your home, you probably have only three minutes in which to
get out. After that, flammable materials inside the house may have blocked your
exit.
At certain seasons, you have
even less time. A live-action video showed a Christmas tree literally exploding
into flame. In just 44 seconds, choking smoke filled the room. “The smoke is
toxic,” the firefighters said, “more dangerous than the fire itself.”
Are your smoke detectors
working? Do you even have any?
Hollywood typically shows
smudged heroes emerging from thick smoke standing up, carrying a dishevelled heroine or child. It doesn’t happen that way in
real life. The only way out of a smoke filled room is on your hands and knees,
even on your belly.
In contrast to the seemingly
endless parade of deaths in house fires, not one child has been lost in a
school fire in our area in recent years. Because schools had
mandatory fire drills. Children knew what to do, and did it.
Few know what to do at home.
Some simple rules
Here are some simple rules, in case a fire breaks out at night.
1. Get out of bed. Amazingly, many people stay in bed, perhaps hoping that the
smoke alarm will go away if they pull the covers up higher.
2. Crawl – don’t walk – to the door.
3. Feel the door. If it’s cool, open it a crack to see if you can get out of
the house through the hallway outside.
4. If it’s hot, close the door. If possible, plug the space along the bottom of
the door with clothes or a blanket.
5. Turn on a light, so that firefighters or neighbours
will know you’re there.
6. Go to the window. If the window is on the ground floor, get out. If it’s on
a higher floor, make noise. Wait to be rescued. Don’t jump unless the fire is
already scorching your pyjamas.
7. Know where to meet other family members if you get separated.
8. And one last point, that several acquaintances learned the hard way when
they were evacuated during the forest fires that raged around the province in
2003 – know what’s important to rescue, and what isn’t.
Their experience got Joan and
me thinking. Our first priority, we realized, was our living things. Second,
the one-of-a-kind possessions that could never be replaced, regardless of money
– family photos and records, heirlooms… Everything else, a
distant third.
Every home should have an
alternate exit – but many don’t. Half of the homes I have lived in had a single
staircase to the second floor. If fire engulfed that staircase, I’d be trapped.
Don’t count on being okay
But emergencies are not limited to house fires. Other
parts of this continent, right now, are coping with hurricanes, tornadoes,
forest fires, and floods. Along the west coast, add earthquakes and mudslides.
People prepare for some of
those emergencies, but ignore others.
“I used to think of nature as
friendly,” a mother told me a few years ago. “Then I moved to Wisconsin.”
She had to teach her children
about tornadoes in summer, blizzards and bitter cold in winter. Fortunately,
she did teach them – she didn’t assume they would never need that training.
Taking time now to plan how to
deal with an emergency can help Canadians protect their families, explained Don
Shropshire, national director of disaster management
for the Canadian Red Cross, in Ottawa.
The big disasters make news –
the 1997 flood in southern Manitoba, central Canada’s great ice storm of 1998,
the firestorm that torched 239 houses here in Kelowna four years ago, the gales
that toppled thousands of trees in Vancouver’s Stanley Park last December…
But these events stand out
because they are the exceptions.
In the Vancouver area, residents experienced extended periods without power last
winter, some as long as a week.
Public Safety Canada and the
Red Cross both recommend having emergency supplies sufficient for 72 hours if
necessary – food, water, medicines, diapers and formula for infants, fresh
batteries for radios and flashlights…
Key documents, such as
passports and birth certificates, belong in a safety deposit box. But you
should have photocopies in a waterproof container in case you need to prove
your identity, or need to contact financial institutions or government
agencies.
Train yourself
Drivers take training in coping with traffic. Really dedicated
drivers take skid pad courses. Pilots don’t get a licence
until they prove they can recover from a stall. Mountain climbers practice
rescue techniques. And police, soldiers, and paramedics train endlessly for
crises, until their response becomes almost instinctive.
But you’re less likely to
encounter an emergency in any of these situations than in your own home.
Why then is home the place
where people are least likely to have an emergency plan, let alone practise it?
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Copyright © 2007 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study
groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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