We are in month 3 of Oregon Ready following the Eugene Water & Electric Board's Pledge to Prepare to be “2 weeks ready” for disaster situations.
We've received several disaster preparedness questions from you, our listeners and readers. So we have invited EWEB's Emergency Management Specialist, Jenny Demaris, back to KLCC to get some answers to your questions.
Love Cross: Hi, Jenny.
Jenny Demaris: Hi there.
Cross: So let's get right to these questions. We got one from Jack who says “I think I probably have everything I need at various places in my house, but I have no idea about what part of the house would be accessible, like after an earthquake. Where is the best place to store a go bag?”
Demaris: Great question. For your 3-minute, I need to leave right now, go bag, we recommend that you try to put it somewhere near your front door. Many folks have a front, closet area. That's a good place to go, but we know in an earthquake, sometimes our doorjambs can get a little bit askew, and you may not be able to get that door open. So that might be your reason to identify another place in your house that's a little bit more accessible, or if you have a garage where you have an exterior door, really be thinking about easy to grab and go as you're evacuating, or if you know that it would be easier to get back into this portion. Of your house to be able to retrieve something. I also just want to point out, for earthquakes, you're not necessarily evacuating your community, you're just evacuating your house. So, if you have your car kit, probably more important than grabbing that 3-minute go bag after an earthquake is making sure you have the keys to your car, because your car will be your first place of shelter. We know it's rain, cold here in Oregon, pretty much most of the time. So your place of safety directly after an earthquake is going to be your car. Get the garage door open, get your car out, and you would already have enough food and water and supplies and your basic essentials to get you through that first 72 hours with your car kit. If you're evacuating for a wildfire or a hazardous material event where you may not be coming back to your house for several days. That's that 3-minute go kit that you want to have. So having that in the hall closet probably works well. And for an earthquake, you're going to be relying on the resources you have in your car until it's safe to get back into your house.
Cross: All right, great. We also heard from Jeff, who had kind of a similar question. He says it would be good to hear more about storage location concerns for the two-week supply. So a little different from the go bag. He says, “although we've so far stored 28 gallons of water and a shelf of food, which we rotate, it won't be of much use if it gets buried under a pile of rubble.” And of course, everyone's houses might withstand something like that a little differently.
Demaris: So we're thinking about Cascadia—our onshore earthquakes, not as significant— our houses are going to do pretty well. But the Cascadia, yes, of course, we know it'll be a significant impact. However, I just want to say the Eugene metro area has a really good geology, so most of our houses are going to fare better than other areas. But look at your house. Look where your natural divisions of your house are. Meaning, is the garage attached to this side, is the kitchen an add-on? Look at your roofline structure. That's going to give you a good indication if there's going to be any natural separations of your house. Also, do you have a solid concrete foundation, or do you have, like a brick and mortar foundation? All of these things are going to give you some of those signals about how your house is going to twist and turn during that main shock. I also just want to point out while we're listening, it's not just the main shock. You're going to have continuous aftershocks. So, when you're looking about where you want to place your supplies, again, going back to something that's near an exterior door, an exterior window, something that you can easily get through. And I just want to assure everyone that's listening, after a significant earthquake and the aftershocks settle down— about three to five days— our public is very resourceful. You have a lot of amazing neighbors. People are going to come together as a community and say, “let's look at your house, Chuck and Dora, and let's see how it is. I think we can safely get into your house and be able to figure out how to get your supplies.” As long as they're not buried under the second-story stairwell, back in the far corner where you really would not be able to get to them, most of us are going to be able to get back into our house to safely extract the supplies that we need. We may be outside of our houses for a few weeks until we can have a real assessment. But I feel, as an emergency manager, confident that the public is going to be able to get back into their house and get those supplies that they have saved for that purpose.
Cross: All right, great. So now we have one from Betty. This goes back to the “go bags.” She says, “I started on this path over a year ago, and then with the EWEB emergency preparedness information, I’ve added more.” So she cautiously feels prepared if a disaster happens while she's at home, but she says “we spend much of our time out and about in our cars at work, and she asks, I suppose the best strategy is to have the same to-go bag in your car, at work, etc. This is a lot. What's the recommendation here?” And you kind of touched on that a little bit earlier.
Demaris: Yeah, so great question. So, if you look at the evolution of preparedness as a society, we used to say, have your 72-hour kit in your car. That pretty much was the only focus about preparing people that were out on the street away from home. And then we moved into being 2 weeks ready at home. So when you're thinking about what's in your car, it's really so that you can survive as a place of safety in your vehicle for about 72 hours. You're going to need water, you're going to need a way to stay warm. If you have children or pets that travel with you, you're going to have some sort of a meal bar or something that they can eat. You're going to need to have a little bit about sanitation. Same things that you would need at home, but less quantity. And really, if you're having to evacuate your home, again, wildfire or hazardous material event, your 3-minute go bag should have the things about extra changes of clothes, other hygiene, your medications, important documents, communication information. That's then going to augment the basic essentials you have in your car. So, in your car, minimum 72 hours, your go bag, because you have to be away from the house, we'd like to have another 72 to 96 hours, and then your cash at home is so that you can stay there for at least two weeks, and if you need to, you can use the resources in your car.
Cross: OK. Brian in Corvallis had a question about water rotation, and I just want to add that we will definitely be focusing on water sanitation and storage as we move through the Oregon Ready series this year. So, much more on that to come. But his question reads, “rather than store my emergency water supply in unwieldy drums or tanks, I'm reusing dozens of cleaned out plastic juice bottles. I rotate them by using a couple containers each week for watering my indoor plants. I use city tap water. For those who use non-rotated containers such as 5 gallon containers or up to 50 gallon drums, how often should that water be changed?”
Demaris: Great question. And first of all, I just want to emphasize, if you're storing any water that you intend to consume, it should always be a food grade container. So that's the first priority. Second is to make sure whatever container you're using, that you're actually sanitizing it before you put the water source in there. The third piece is, no matter what you're storing the water in, if it's sitting for long periods of time, you should really think about doing a secondary sanitation to the water that you've been storing. That's as simple as boiling it, adding those few drops of bleach based on the amount of water that you have, or you could take the water and then put it into a secondary filter like the hiker bottles that they use when they're up in the mountains, and it has a built-in filtration system. So even though you're storing the water, you should still sanitize it. But back to the original question, how long? At a minimum, we would like to see you rotate your water at least annually. You could do it every six months. We also talk about people like during the summertime and you need to water your outdoor plants, that's a perfect time to rotate that water out and have a good use for it, so we're not wasting it. But at a minimum, every year, you should be rotating that water out.
Cross: OK. How about the question for people who have hot tubs or pools because they're going to have several hundreds of gallons of water just sitting there.
Demaris: Great question. I just want to point out any water that is chemically contaminated, meaning it has a chemical additive in it such as our hot tubs, will not be, you could not filter it to consume. However, hot tubs are great. We don't have water, but I'd like to flush my toilet. Great. You can use your hot tub water in those smaller quantities to be able to use for sanitation. You could also use your hot tub water to just wash your hands with some soap and water. I would just keep in mind that if there's no longer power to your hot tub, or if you haven't recently updated your chemicals in your hot tub, just know that hot tubs breed a lot of bacteria.
Cross: OK. And then what about the temperature for storing water? We have all these gallons of water now, and we need to kind of be aware of where we're keeping that. So in the summer it doesn't rise too hot. In the winter it doesn't freeze. That might not be as much of a concern. But what are your recommendations there?
Demaris: So obviously the cold temperatures are not so much a concern, although if you overfill them, they're going to crack and break if they freeze. For the summertime, the most concern I would have is if you're storing your water outside in an uninsulated shed. Then the water is really reaching a very high temperature that could have an increase for a type of bacteria. I don't know which one, but I'm just saying that. So, making sure you sanitize the containers in advance, that will help limit it or reduce that. And then also just knowing you may have to sanitize that water. It would be better to store that water inside an insulated garage or something else versus outside where you know the temperatures are exceeding. I don't think the CDC has actually put a limit about what the temperature threshold would be because we see, all across the US, especially in our military service members, that their water is stored many times over high temperatures, and I think they just go through that process of sanitation. But the food grade container is the key because of the chemical makeup and the breakdown when it heats up.
Cross: Have you received many questions about the EWEB Pledge to Prepare program? We're in month three. You've been out doing presentations and various things.
Demaris: Yeah, so I think probably our most asked question that we're hearing, just like you and I talked about earlier is, oh, “I didn't think about that.” So I think we hear the community— their to-do list is increasing with more things that they're, like, “oh, yeah, I should probably do that.” I will say in February, we focused on the family emergency plan, and there really hasn't been a resource available when you look at state, local government, they've went to kind of digital. Anyway, we've had a lot of folks comment on, “oh, that family emergency plan really lays out all the different details that we should be collecting so that if we have to leave our home, we've got it ready to go.”
Cross: OK, great. Well, Jenny, you're always so informative and we really appreciate this information.
Demaris: Thank you. And thank you for sharing this with your public.
That was Jenny Demaris, EWEB’s Emergency Management Specialist. If you have questions about disaster preparedness, send an email to questions@klcc.org.
