Above Yourself

It’s hard to justify preparing for a disaster if we’ve never been in one, but news of events such as hurricanes, tornadoes, and earthquakes seem to come more frequently all the time. Preparing ourselves for these types of situations helps us focus on more important things during times of need and helps us rise above ourselves and help others. My wife and I have both experienced situations where we’ve been in extended power outages, and on a separate occasion my family had to evacuate our house because of a fire that came into our town. To help us prepare for situations like this, it’s important to put a some items together in a 72-hour kit. Below are some resources for putting together a 72-hour kit. If you are just getting started (like we are), I recommend buying some pieces of the kit each week so that the cost is spread out and the kit is easier to manage.

Recommended items:
• Weekly plan to add items
• Ready.gov’s list
• About.com’s list
• More advanced kit ideas

For Kids:
• Ready.gov’s site for kids

Our friend Brian recently built an emergency rope ladder for to keep on the second story of their house in case of a fire. It looks great, isn’t too expensive, and was fairly quick to make. He describes a few steps of how it was made:

It cost me $20 in supplies. I got two 8 foot 2×4′s and cut them into 16 inch steps. Then I threaded the two 25 foot lengths of rope through holes drilled through each end of the steps and tied knots at 16 inch intervals for the steps to rest on. I’d be happy to give more detailed instructions if you wish to make one for your house. The major tricky part is tying knots as you thread the rope, while also tying the knots at even intervals.

It looks great! We could definitely use one of these around in case of an emergency.