Emergency Supplies Area: are you Ready? Do you have an area designated for your emergency supplies? Is it located in your garage near your vehicles? Or, is it in a closet in your home near an exit?
If not, maybe it’s time to start putting a plan into action!
If you are a new reader of my blog, welcome! If you are already a follower of this series about emergency planning and preparedness, welcome back! Every month I write a post about emergency planning and preparedness to help us all get closer to reaching a goal of being better prepared than we were a month ago.
Missed some of the earlier posts in this series? Here’s a list with links:
- Resolve to be Ready 2014
- Blackout: are you Ready?
- Pet Owners: are you Ready?
- Evacuation: are you Ready?
- Alert: are you Ready?
- Water: are you Ready?
- Smoke Alarms: are you Ready?
- Emergency Food Supply: are you Ready?
- Fly-away Kit: are you Ready?
- Family Emergency Kit: are you Ready?
- Snowstorm: are you Ready?
- Resolve to be Ready 2014
- Clothing: are you Ready?
Do you see a pattern here? Every month I tackle one subject to bring us all closer to preparedness. While you can never be fully prepared or have a contingency plan in place for every possible scenario, having some kind of plan in place is better than having nothing at all.
That’s what we had in October 2007 – nothing at all in place for emergencies. And, on October 22, 2007, our home burned to the ground in a wildfire. Poof; gone in about 30 minutes, even though 18 firefighters were on the scene attempting to save it.
I’ve written a series about the loss of our home in this wildfire and our rebuild and it can be accessed starting with the first post in the series right here: Any Way the Wind Blows.
This month’s post, Emergency Supplies Area: are you Ready? is short and sweet. While this post is short, the tackling of this project could become a major undertaking depending on your garage or closet. If you don’t have space set aside in your garage to store your emergency supplies, I’m suggesting that you take this month, clear a space near your vehicles (ours is a 4-shelf storage unit directly in front of my vehicle) and set up some type of shelving. Either buy a new shelving unit specifically for this project or repurpose shelving you already have.
No garage in your home because you live in an apartment? Designate a closet for this project OR if closet space is minimal, designate a part of a closet. It is best to have your emergency supplies as close to an exit as possible, so that if you have the time during an emergency, you can access them easily and carry them out to your car.
So, that’s it for this month! Create an area for your emergency supplies. If you’ve completed some of the projects in this series (such as your pet, food, water, clothing and fly-away kit), once you’ve finished clearing space for your emergencies supplies, transfer your supplies to that area.
And, if you are wondering why I waited until now to put this project in the lineup, its because I felt all the projects preceding this one were more important. It is more important that you have a family evacuation plan in place. It is more important that you have a plan for your pet in place. It is more important that you have a supply of food, water and other emergency supplies in place. You get the drift…
Now that we have the “more important” stuff handled, we can focus on a place to store them! So, I ask again: emergency supplies area: are you ready? If not, now’s your chance to get started!
Here’s an updated project list for you to print and add to your Family Emergency Preparedness Planning Checklist binder: Resolve to Be Ready Project Checklist updated 3-23-2015.
Tootles,
Here are a few other emergency planning posts that may be of interest to you:
42 Important Papers in Your Home
That is an excellent idea. I can’t even begin to imagine how you handled such a tragic event, but at least everything is ok now. Would it help to put it in a vault?
That’s a good question. I do know someone who had things stored in a safe and who’s home also burned to the ground. The safe was intact, but when they opened it, all the documents were reduced to ash! Apparently the heat of the fire was so extreme, it caused the contents of the safe to combust!