Water – Elusive Elixir and Unwelcome Invader

Over 12 million people are suffering from the worst drought in sixty years in an area known as the Horn of Africa – Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya. The drought has severely impacted food supplies so that now around one million are facing starvation. Hundreds of people are dying every day, and nearly half of those are children.

In an almost surreal event, Vermont was hit by a hurricane last month. An astonishing one-and-a-half inches of rain fell every hour for a while, pushing river water to record levels. Homes were destroyed and many historic bridges and roads were washed away. Several towns were flooded in several feet of water and 5 million people were without power. In the end, the storm cost $45 billion dollars and the lives of 40 people. Recovery will take weeks to months, with many things lost forever.

Water is absolutely necessary for life. We need it to move nutritional elements and essential salts through our bodies. Blood is about 8% of our body weight and about 50% of that is plasma, which is mostly water. This vital fluid moves through our heart and kidneys and filters out the bad and unwanted material. As the amount of water in our body shrinks, the delicate balance of fluid composition is disrupted and the body becomes much more susceptible to infection and disease.

On the other hand, too much water can dilute your body’s electrolytic balance and neurons can no longer fire and cells miss important messages. While we are all sadly aware of drowning, a person can literally die from consuming too much water as well. This is extreme, to be sure, but it can and has happened.

Once water has seeped into your home, your carpets, and your walls, it often prepares a perfect spot to host undesirable elements such as mold, mildew and fungus. It is so difficult to rid of them that sometimes the wet objects (keepsakes to furniture to houses) can only be thrown away or completely replaced.

Water, so necessary and yet so dangerous. We cannot tell Mother Nature where to drop this life-giving/life-threatening elixir, but we can look at our own lives and think, “What if...” then “What can I do to protect this...”

For those who want to find some way to help those in need in the Horn of African, go to: http://www.wfp.org/stories/horn-africa-10-ways-you-can-help.

Viva Revolucíon!

Wow! What a week! One of the most important events in many of our lifetimes just occurred this past week. After 30 years of inarguably a corrupt and repressive government, the Egyptian President received a strong boot in the pants by the country’s own people. And what impressed me the most was that 1) relatively few people died and 2) it happened in large part by the power of the country’s youth!

OK, Sue, this seems a LARGE stretch to emergency preparedness, right? Au contraire! The youth of Egypt and the world are a much different breed from those of us from an earlier generation. Today, they communicate FAR more than we did at that age. They text, they tweet, they Facebook, they blog. And when Mubarak’s regime decided to pull the plug on the Internet for Egyptians, that was apparently “it!”

So, the point is that communication has changed drastically and it is really up to us to use it. Many people who felt lost in New Orleans after Katrina “found” their family via Facebook. Blogs gave a voice to those who wanted to let others know that they were broken a bit, but not beaten, and gave people a reason to hope. Text messages reached places that normal voice messages could not.

Communication will probably be the thing that will mean the successful survival after a major disaster. Yes, some services will be disrupted and possibly out for a while, but when we have so many ways of communicating, one will eventually be our way to life and recovery.

So, tweet, blog or log on to that Facebook now and start your own revolution to be prepared.

Prepare for Zombies

This was a title suggested by my teenaged daughter when I asked her about things to worry about in emergencies. Well, I suppose that I wasn’t real specific with my query, but it undoubtedly would be something about which to worry if you encountered one.

For the record, George A. Romero’s 1968 classic cult film, “Night of the Living Dead” probably framed the image we carry today of “zombies...,” those stiff walking, flesh-sloughing, flesh-eating creatures who come out only at night... Even though the zombie concept had been created around 50 years earlier, this was quite a terrifying film in its day.

I cannot help but worry about zombies, though. For some people in Africa and Haiti, this notion still exists in corners of their culture. Frankly, with all that has gone on in the slaughter of people over land, resources, religion and bigotry in Africa and the devastation from hurricanes, earthquakes and widespread disease in Haiti – who is to say that for many people, zombies in some form are quite real.

So, to prepare for zombies, I guess there is the only thing that really prepares us for anything – knowledge. Sometimes horrible things do happen. They happen without reason or warning. They happen whether you “deserve” them or not. They just do. So, ward off zombies by just preparing for the worst. Then, once you have, you can’t worry any more. You are ready and whatever happens, zombie or not, you are ready and you will survive to live another day.