Get Ready for Disaster, Expert Says

DEEP Speaker Convinces Even Me

By Carol Volkart

When I got home from Jackie Kloosterboer’s March 5 talk on earthquake preparedness, the first thing I did was check out the top shelves of my kitchen cupboards.

Hmmm. On the highest shelf was a big green teapot that could bounce right out and hit me on the head. Next layer down were my biggest glass bowls, ready to skitter out and shatter. At the top of another set of cupboards was a blender, its substantial glass container meant to withstand heat and heavy-duty mixing, but wow, lethal if it went flying.

It was exactly what Kloosterboer had warned about at that evening’s presentation to the Dunbar Earthquake and Emergency Preparedness AGM: “What do we put up high?” she asked. “The heavy mixing bowl! What do we put down low? Tupperware! What if we switch it around?”

Thanks to a little nudge at a DEEP talk, here I am, shifting my dishes around to make my kitchen safer in an earthquake.

Why didn’t I think of this when I arranged my kitchen? For the same reason, I’d guess, that most of us have never gotten around to the most basic preparations for living in earthquake country. Such as: Assessing our homes for obvious dangers, remembering what really to do when the earth shakes, setting up an out-of-province family contact, and most important of all, assembling emergency supplies like a grab-and-go kit, and a home emergency kit.

“Less than 20 percent of the population has actually taken time to prepare,” says Kloosterboer, who spent 20 years with Emergency Support Services in Vancouver and now presents disaster preparedness workshops around the province. “We live in an area with earthquakes, so what is your excuse? How are those excuses going to work for you when we are facing a major earthquake?”

Her favourite excuse, and she’s heard it over and over, is, “What if I can’t access my disaster supplies?”

Her answer: “But what if you could get your supplies and you didn’t bother? Wouldn’t that be worse?”

And then, quite firmly after a week in which several small earthquakes had shaken southern B.C., she adds: “We do have to take action.”

Well, I confess. I’m in that 80 percent that hasn’t done a darn thing. I haven’t prepared my house, asked my out-of-province sister to be the family contact, and worst of all, my emergency supplies consist of a couple of jugs of water in the basement and a Coleman camp stove. I don’t even have a spare can opener in case we’re reduced to the few cans of tuna on the basement shelves.

Like most of us, I know better. It’s not like there hasn’t been warning after warning since I moved to B.C. from the reassuringly stable Alberta prairies in the early 1970s.

My main excuse comes right from Kloosterboer’s mouth: Why bother assembling emergency supplies if I might not be able to get to them? Plus, oh, the trouble of collecting all those items – it would take a year! And, all that food and water having to be changed and checked every six months. Who has the time?

So why, after decades of ignoring the warnings, was I suddenly checking out the arrangement of my kitchen cabinets? (Which actually swayed a bit during one of the recent earthquakes while I stood naively beneath them and watched.)

Even before Kloosterboer’s speech, the soil had been tilled – for me, and I suspect, for many of my Dunbar neighbours. Last August’s spectacular fire at 41st and Collingwood, which could have destroyed much more if a few factors had been different, got me thinking. Then in January came the Los Angeles fires, with their stark images of neighbourhoods reduced to ashes. Followed by the recent bump, bump, bump of little earthquakes under our feet.

“People are finally waking up,” says DEEP’s treasurer Jan Eagle. Instead of the 10 people who used to show up at DEEP presentations, the crowds are so big that one recently had to be repeated to accommodate the overflow.

Kloosterboer, who actually offers a course called “Mom’s Ultimate Disaster Plan,” has a mom-like presence – understanding, humourous, and yet strict about the essentials. Who would want to disappoint a person like that?

But more than that, she has a way of bringing home the reality of what a disaster would feel like. If my nearby Stong’s, and every other grocery store in the area was closed, what would I do? If the bridges were closed, splitting up family members around the city, how would we get back together? If cellphones and other communication avenues didn’t work, what then?

She bolsters her persuasion with a trove of front-line stories of what disaster means to real people.

There was the older couple who lost everything when a forest fire swallowed the entire town of Lytton. “We were told to get ready, but we didn’t really think it would happen to us,” the woman told Kloosterboer at the emergency reception centre. Nothing would have saved their home, Kloosterboer said in her presentation, but if the couple had their supplies together and put some treasured possessions into their car, “it would have been much different.”

She also has a story about agreeing to be the out-of-town contact for a New Zealand woman she met, and, amazingly, ending up connecting her with her mother after the big Christchurch earthquake a few months later.

Part of Kloosterboer‘s charm is that she doesn’t expect perfection. There’s the “right” way of preparing your house and yourself for disaster, and then there’s reality.

So when an audience member says some of her older acquaintances would never get back up from under the table if they followed the standard instructions of taking cover there in an earthquake, Kloosterboer understands. In those cases, she says, they should brace themselves against an interior wall, protect their head, and get away from windows. Those in wheelchairs should put their brakes on, bend forward and protect their heads. “Do what you can. That will better protect you than nothing.”

She recalls moving into an apartment where her bedroom was all glass, and imagining the newspaper headline: “Emergency planner killed by broken glass.” She knew her bed shouldn’t be under a window, but she did what she could – she went out and bought heavy curtains. “Was it perfect? No. But at least I took action. I did something to better protect myself.”

It often won’t be possible to do the perfect thing, she says. “But do what you can and that’s going to better protect you than doing nothing at all.”

Part of that is looking at your own house through the lens of how it would be affected by an earthquake. Kloosterboer makes that real by noting that she went into a house where someone had stored weights on top of a cabinet. Putting them at a lower level could actually save someone’s life, she says.

Which led to a discussion of the most dangerous room of the house – the kitchen – where people like me store the heaviest items up high, where they’ll do the most damage. “If the cupboard flies open and you get hit by Tupperware, it’s not going to do the damage a heavy mixing bowl would do,” she says.

While Kloosterboer acknowledges that everyone’s situation is different, and we should just do the best we can to prepare for earthquakes, one thing is non-negotiable: We must have emergency supplies. “You and your family could be on your own for three days or longer,” she says. “If we have a major earthquake, it’s going to be a lot longer than three days.”

This boils down to two essentials: A grab-and-go kit, kept near the door, for each person in the household, that contains immediately needed basics – water, medications, a change of clothes, a flashlight, a spare set of car keys, cash, and copies of insurance and other important documents. The second essential is a household emergency kit with food, water and other supplies that can sustain the family for longer. Plus, if there are pets, similar supplies for them.

As for what exactly should be included in each kit, Kloosterboer says there are endless Internet sites about preparing for emergencies.

“The challenge here is that you’ve got to get prepared. Start small, you don’t have to do it all tonight when you go home. Tackle it bit by bit and get it done.”

Asked at the end of her talk about the high level of unpreparedness for earthquakes in this area, she says she’s noticed that it’s people who have lived here for a long time that are most complacent. New arrivals from places like Toronto or Winnipeg, she’s found, are much more likely to be prepared.

Perhaps, like me, long-time British Columbians think they’ve gotten away with it so far, so why not try for longer?

But Kloosterboer was my wake-up call. That darn teapot is about to move down in the world!

Kloosterboer’s presentation is available on the DEEP website at https://dunbaremergency.ca/event/agm-and-presentation-fire-awareness-prevention-tips-and-preparing-a-household-response-plan/

Kloosterboer also has an online disaster preparedness program at https://www.survive-it.ca/