Personal Safety and Security in a Natural Disaster

When a natural disaster strikes, chaos naturally follows. We'd all like to think that the good in humans come out then. But altruism does not always rule the day and that is simply human nature. Whether you find yourself facing a hurricane, earthquake, tornado, wildfire, or tsunami, it is essential to take your own personal safety and security in a natural disaster into consideration. The sad fact is that when natural disaster strikes, some people will seek personal gain. You must arm and protect yourself and there are a number of products on the market that can help you stay secure. First, it is always best to employ common sense as your first line of defense of your personal safety and security in a natural disaster. Stay aware of your situation and surroundings. Stay informed by listening to the news on a battery operated radio or watching it on television if your power is working. Make sure you stay in communication with your family and friends and with emergency service personnel if needed. Products to help you stay informed and in communication are available as well. You want to think portable and battery operated. If you have no power or need to evacuate, it must be easy to take with you. Next you'll want to consider legal ways of arming yourself to ensure your personal safety and security in a natural disaster. Pepper spray is one option you have for arming yourself against any looters, marauders or other potential danger. Pepper spray is a chemical compound that irritates the eyes and causes difficulty in breathing when sprayed directly at the perpetrator's face. One thing to take into consideration is that you must be fairly close to your target in order to effectively dose them with the pepper spray. The lasting effect of pepper spray varies, but typically can be counted on to disable the perpetrator for up to an hour in some manner. Another way of ensuring your personal safety is through the use of a stun gun.Stun guns deliver an electric shock to the perpetrator and cause them to go into involuntary muscle spasms. This gives you time to put distance between yourself and the person intending to do you harm. Stun guns cause acute pain when administered effectively. Stun guns are used by police departments nationwide. For more information see the section of our website dealing with personal safety and security in a natural disaster and visit our link to our sister web site Personal Security is Yours.

5 Ways to Prepare for a Disaster

Well let's face it, disasters seem to be happening more often than ever before. Whether or not you are counting, you have thought about it. We all should prepare for the eventual earthquake or storm which will leave us without many options for going to the neighborhood market or hardware store for supplies. This article is to help you plan for such an event in your life. Your needs at home, school or the office need to be planned for ahead of time. After the event is not the time to look for essentials. So, let's discuss some of the basics allowing you to modify the essentials for your particular situation. The family home is our mainstay of family life. We have our family, our belongings and our lives there. If you live in an earthquake prone area, you need to prepare for the eventuality of a disaster involving you and your family. Sit down with your family and decide how you are going to get in touch with each other if an emergency occurs. Gather your family together and figure out how to contact each other. Your family will need to be able to contact each other so be sure to make plans with the entire family. Designate one person who does not live with you to be your family contact person. You will need a person who does live with you to be the designated contact. A close friend or relative who does not live with you should be the designated contact person. Make sure everyone in the family carries the phone number of the contact person with them. In the event of an emergency and the family is not together, everyone should contact that person to let them know where they are. The person whom you have designated as the contact person should be available most days, in another words, do not pick someone who travels or is gone quite often. Designate a meeting place near your home so everyone can be assembled. Everyone should know the place you have decided to assemble after an emergency. Emergencies are hectic and everyone should know where to meet afterwards. Run through a mock evacuation of your home to determine the best escape route for each part of the home. Time the evacuation to make sure the routes you have chosen are the shortest and safest. Your home might have multiple escape routes and these should be evaluated to insure a quick escape from emergencies. Think about what items you might wish to take with you. Be sure to remember mementos, family heirlooms, wills or pictures. You will need to keep valuable and non-replaceable in mind when an emergency happens. Take care to have the items you want to take nearby if you need to move quickly Have an emergency kit handy and assemble in a designated place, making sure the kit has the essentials you will need for at least 3 days. Fully stocked emergency kits are vital and should be kept near the escape routes in your home. Keep the emergency kit where it is accessible to the whole family, think of the laundry room, or the closet near the door. Remember to keep enough water and food for at least 3 days in your emergency kit, including a can opener if can goods are included. Include a can opener if can goods are included in your emergency kit, along with 3 days of food and water for your family. Keep 3 day's water and food handy for quick evacuation. Remember to include First Aid supplies, including bandages, scissors, rubber gloves, tape, radio, a flashlight along with the food, water and shelter in your emergency kit are some vital things to remember. If possible include some sort of shelter, for example a tarp and light rope. Keep a portable light source like a lantern filled with fuel or batteries ready at all times. If you have pets, include pet food and supplies so our animals can survive also. Your pets will need food and water to be provided in the event of an emergency. This can be a trying time for pets so remember to provide food and water for them along with the families' 3 day supply. This article has been prepared to make you aware of the basics of preparing for the inevitable eventuality of a disaster involving your home and family. It is not a complete essay of everything possible you can do, but a short list of things you can do at little expense that could save lives. Good luck and think about the forgoing as prudent planning.

Clean up Flood Damage with Disaster Professionals

Mitigation is vital in order to limit the effects of water damage. After all, the longer water is allowed to remain in a building, the greater the damage will be. Lack of mitigation services to flooded homes and other buildings can lead to secondary damages to the structure and contents from elevated humidity conditions, as well as potential microbial growth issues. If you're working in the insurance field and need to deal with a home or business that's been damaged by flooding, the most important thing you can do is to get emergency services underway immediately. In other words, begin the mitigation process in order prevent the need for remediation. Rapid response limits the overall effects of water damage and mitigation reduces overall claim cost. It doesn't take long for water to cause serious damage, and that damage gets worse the longer excess water is present. That's why it's important to call a quality cleanup company to deal with the problem right away. Professionals will be on site and provide an immediate assessment and begin mitigation services. Services you should look for include extraction of water, removal of saturated building materials, application of EPA registered anti-microbial products, as well as set up of high velocity air movers and dehumidification equipment. Both air movement and dehumidification are essential components required to stabilize the building environment and enable structural drying. Rapid response not only limits Property loss, but it can also reduce the impact to a homeowner's lifestyle or the amount of interruption to a business. In other words, the family can get back their regular dinner table and the business owner can be back in business that much sooner. DisasterPro.net is a great place to go if you're dealing with disaster cleanup. They are a professional, IICRC certified company, that utilizes all the necessary steps to stabilize and dry your structure. If upon inspection, mold issues are discovered, they are also a certified and recognized company that can provide mold remediation services. Of course, flood damage isn't the only field they work in, either. If you're dealing with a client whose property has suffered fire and smoke damage, or other disasters, they can help. As a Emergency Service Disaster Restoration company, DisasterPro.net is certified and recognized as industry leaders in providing smoke, odor, fire, and trauma clean-up services. They'll be there fast to keep the situation from getting worse and to save you and the client money. That's why insurance professionals recommend http://www.DisasterPro.net, and why you should check them out.

Disaster Preparedness Plan

Disasters can happen anywhere and anytime around the world: fires, floods, earthquakes, hurricanes and tornadoes are some of the most feared natural disasters. They have taken billions of lives till date and we still live with an impression that we cannot be affected by them. If a disaster occurs in your community, local agencies and disaster-relief groups are there for help. However, emergency personnel may not be available immediately. They may take several hours, to several days to reach. It’s your preparedness that can decide your chances of survival in such situations. Your emergency preparedness will be the key to you and your family’s safety and survival. Disaster preparedness is an essential element for you and your family's well-being. A little time spent today can ensure the well being of you and your loved once in the time of disasters. Having essential survival plans and supplies like a family communication plan and emergency kits can provide the necessary resources to help you and your family get through a lot of difficult situations that may come up unforeseen, a bad storm, fires, earthquake being a few of them. Survival supplies and preparation:- 1. Establish a communication plan: - Phones have become the key communication equipment today. Almost all our communication that happens when we are not face to face with a person happens on phones. Have you ever given a though as to how will you communicate with you loved once if phones are out of service. Now let’s add a fact to this situation. During a natural or man-made calamity or disaster phones are bound to go out of service. Does your family know what to do if you can't contact one another by phone? Where would you gather in an emergency? We should all have a plan that is easy enough for even our youngest children to remember and follow. As a matter of fact the U. S. government has in force a plan that in the event of another terrorist attack, EVERYONE's ability to use cell phones, blackberries, etc., will immediately be cut-off, as this is the preferred communication source used by terrorists and is often the way that their bombs are detonated. How will you communicate with your loved ones in the event you cannot speak to each other? Solution is a clear cut and well defined plan that should be in place before hand. 2. Evacuation Plans: - In cases where evacuations become necessary, the local officials provide information through media and other methods like sirens and telephonic calls. There may be situations under which you and your family may feel threatened and evacuations may become necessary to avoid these situations. Always keep a tank full of gas in your car if there seems like a possibility of evacuation. Gas may not be available or there may be a shortage of time to get it under such circumstances. Always keep your survival supplies handy and at a place where you and your family members can locate it easily. We will cover the items that should be a part of your survival supplies in our later posts.

Communication in Times of Disaster

During the early days of the 20th Century, communication was slow and cumbersome. The crisis of the 1908 fire in San Francisco could only be understood on the East Coast as telegraph keys pounded out the details. Morse code ruled the day! Today's modern communication and emergency networks are far superior to what has existed in the past, when they work. The inherent problem with many of these new advances is that they are very dependent upon a rather fragile infrastructure. In 2003 the massive Eastern and Midwestern States as well as parts of Canada suffered a total electrical blackout affecting as many as 45 million people. More than 508 generating units at 265 power plants shut down during the outage. The reliability of the electrical grid was called into question. In 1999 Southern Brazil was darkened by a grid failure that started with a lightning strike. Over 95 million people went without electricity and more than 60,000 people were stuck in Rio’s subway system. The complex array of generators, transmitters and power lines appeared to “break apart” like a shattering tempered glass window. Just as a stack of dominoes, as one part of the integrated system fails, many other components quickly follow suit. According to Wikipedia, “As power lines carry more current, they get hotter. This causes them to lengthen and sag between towers. They may safely reach a specified minimum clearance height above the ground. If the lines sag further, a flashover to nearby objects (such as trees) can occur, causing a transient increase in current. Automatic protective relays detect the high current and quickly act to disconnect the faulted line from service. Should a fault occur and take a line out of service, the change in current flow is compensated by other transmission lines, which must have enough spare capacity to carry the excess current. If they do not, overload protection in those lines will also trip, causing a cascading failure as the excess current is switched onto neighboring circuits running at or near their capacity.” On August 29, 2005, the skies above many Gulf Coast towns went dark. When Hurricane Katrina finally passed, emergency services encountered great initial difficulty in establishing communications with rescuers and victims of the disaster-stricken areas. Power lines, cellular phone towers, radio antennae and emergency generators were completely knocked out. Immediately the call went out to a number of amateur radio operators to help with the relief and rescue operations. Morse code was among the various methods used by these operators that were essential in giving aid to emergency services. Without the ability to call on and rely upon the skills of amateur radio operators skilled in Morse code and other communication techniques, disaster relief just might come to a complete stand-still in some of the harshest conditions. Some of the very people who may consider the knowledge of Morse code to be past its prime become the very people that rely upon it when their own “modern” methods fail.

Prevent Natural Disasters In Michigan Through Dumpster Rental

Natural disasters have become quite common in the recent times. The impact of these natural disasters on the earth is ever increasing. The effect of the recent disasters is making the impact of the past ones very tiny. Environmental imbalance is the main reason behind ever increasing ill effects on the environment. Michigan is the eighth most populous state of US and is surrounded by four great lakes namely Lakes Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie, and Ontario, plus Lake Saint Clair. Any resident of the state is not more than 140.3 km from the great lakes. Natural disasters in Michigan usually occur in the form of floods because the state is surrounded by four great lakes. The state that is hit by natural disaster will end up in financial, environmental and human loss. We usually sit on the misconception thinking that we have nothing to do with the calamity that is hitting state rather than being a silent spectator of the ill effects of the calamity. Though it sounds odd, the prevention of these natural calamities is in our hands. Let me tell you how? Land, water and air have their existence on the earth since centuries. They have been source of survival for the inhabitants on the earth since long time. The earth being surrounded by the same resources was very less affected by the natural calamities. Why is the situation experiencing a drastic change in the recent times? It is only due to the environmental imbalance which has brought drastic changes in the climatic conditions. Environmental balance is very important in the states like Michigan because it is surrounded by great lakes and any imbalance in the climatic conditions of the state will result in floods carrying away your property along with the human life. As a responsible citizen of the state, you have to dig the factors that cause environmental imbalance in the state and take preventive action to cap the effects by obstructing the sources that generate them. Major sources that spew pollution into the environment of the state are toxic gases emitted from the fossil fuels and trash generated either due to commercial projects and residential projects in the state. We can reduce the disposal of fossil fuels into the atmosphere by reducing the usage of vehicles and preferring bicycle or walk for the short distance. Effective measures should be taken in all kinds of project to reduce the trash generation right from the inception. Some inevitable trash generated on completion of the major projects should be recycled in environmental friendly manner to mitigate the effects of pollution on the environment for which a professional help is must. Dumpster rental company Michigan will help you in this regard. They get all your trash disposed in environmental friendly manner before it gains your attention. When we take due care to reduce the impact of pollution by disposing the generated trash through dumpster rental Michigan, the impact of the pollution on the environment of the state is greatly reduced so, you are playing a key role in maintaining environmental balance and reducing the number of natural disasters that hit the state by renting trash bin for your garbage disposal needs. On whole what you should you do to share the responsibility to protect the environment of state? It is a tough task no more. Just give call to the dumpster rental company Michigan and let them know specifications of your trash disposal projects and the rest will be handled by them in a cost effective manner.