{"id":340,"date":"2011-05-16T10:13:09","date_gmt":"2011-05-16T02:13:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdennis.com\/ideaport\/?p=340"},"modified":"2011-05-16T10:14:51","modified_gmt":"2011-05-16T02:14:51","slug":"off-topic-lessons-learnt-from-two-disasters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdennis.com\/ideaport\/?p=340","title":{"rendered":"(off topic) Lessons learnt from two disasters"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is completely off topic, but in conversations over the last few weeks people have consistently asked me to write this, so here it is.\u00a0 This is about disaster planning and my experience of living through the threat of disaster, and through two actual disasters.<\/p>\n

The story begins the week after 9\/11.\u00a0 My wife and I were living in London at the time and I vividly recall the Chief of Police giving a statement on television that said it was not a matter of if terrorists would target London, but when.\u00a0 It occurred to me that this was an extraordinary statement, and after giving it some thought I went out and purchased enough food and water for a week.<\/p>\n

We left London a couple of years later and never had to use our emergency supplies.\u00a0 On returning to New Zealand I remember seeing a programme on television about the preparation required to live through an earthquake.\u00a0 One of the comments was that you should have a “grab bag” packed with essentials that would allow you to survive for a few days.<\/p>\n

Given the London experience I thought this was excellent advice, so in addition to duplicating the food reserves from London, I also prepared a grab bag.\u00a0 This included the usual things (first aid, torches, batteries towels, toilet paper, hand sanitiser etc), along with an encrypted USB stick with scans of all the important paper documentation that would prove identity, insurance and wills.\u00a0 I stored this in the basement right beside the door.<\/p>\n

I also bought a Pelican Case to store our backup data as we have ten years of digital photos on hard drives.\u00a0 If you’re not familiar with Pelican Cases, they’re storage boxes that I’m sure are made from the same stuff they use to build airplane Black Boxes.\u00a0 You can put eggs in a Pelican Case and then throw it off a ten metre cliff and the eggs will not break. I thought that was good enough for my data.\u00a0 They are also waterproof to some ridiculous depth.\u00a0 For disaster planning I kept the Pelican Case in my office in case something happened at the house.\u00a0 If you work in IT this is called an off site backup.\u00a0 If you don’t work in IT it’s called a bloody good idea.<\/p>\n

In September the unthinkable happened.\u00a0 Christchurch was hit by a magnitude 7.1 earthquake.\u00a0 Bear in mind that Christchurch had not been affected by earthquakes before, and there were no known fault lines under the city.<\/p>\n

The damage to our house was luckily minimal, but the grab bag was indispensable.\u00a0 We had no power for 24 hours, no water and questionable sewerage.\u00a0 Luckily it wasn’t long before utilities were back to normal for our home.<\/p>\n

However the experience made me re-examine how prepared we were, and I resolved to not only restock what we had used, but also increase the level of preparedness.<\/p>\n

I decided that have survival gear in the basement was a bad idea, because if the house collapsed we’d have nothing.\u00a0 We did have a separate garage and I decided that our essential gear should go there.\u00a0 With that in mind I went to a local hardware store and bought the biggest, toughest storage case I could find.\u00a0 I then filled it with tents, sleeping bags, spare cell phone, a water purifier, torches batteries etc.<\/p>\n

I also purchased a few more specialty items, but researched these carefully before buying them.\u00a0 I didn’t want to buy cheap, poor quality equipment that would fail when you really needed it.\u00a0 Here’s a handful of the key items:<\/p>\n