Prep Series Week 9: Neighborhood Emergency Planning

This is part eight of our ten-part toolkit series providing a step-by-step guide about how to prepare for disaster. You can read Parts 1-8 in the Resources & Toolkits page of Cramming for the Apocalypse.

I’ll be following up this series with one on community preparedness in the Fall. So you can treat this as an introduction to that series which will showcase examples of community preparedness. This will serve as a starting point around emergency preparedness.

When I moved to Portland, Oregon, it was a year after The New Yorker published Kathryn Schulz’s story, “The Really Big One” about the devastating Cascadia Subduction Zone Earthquake that could hit the Pacific Northwest anytime between now and the next fifty years. Schulz described in excruciating detail the massive scale of destruction that could befall the region. While scientists have been trying to warn all of us for a long time about what has become just “the earthquake” locally (e.g., this 2011 Outside story about it), the detail Schulz painted such a vivid picture of what truly could happen, that people finally started paying attention.

We moved here the year after the story was published, just in time for discussions of “the earthquake” to be normalized in day-to-day chatter. And while we might talk about it nonchalantly, it freaked me the F*** out. I got pregnant soon after we arrived and then after that I a was new mom, so not only did I have to figure out how to keep a baby alive day-to-day, but also worry about an earthquake to befall us at any moment. When the initial fear dulled a bit and I could think clearly, I really wanted to know what people were doing about it. From my initial observation, the people around me took it as less of a call to action and more of an acceptance of our fate. That said, many people have taken steps to seismic retrofit their homes and to stock up on food and water lest we be trapped here for weeks. And so I put my ear to the ground to learn what other people have been doing to prepare. 

What I found during this time was a Northeast Portland neighborhood (or really people who lived in two blocks within a neighborhood) who had been preparing as a community since that article came out. I call them the Alameda example throughout this post. I was so intrigued that I wrote a whole story about them in CityLab. And what I found out through the reporting was that these folks who wanted to do some neighborly preparedness accountability unintentionally landed on one of the biggest keys to preparedness: knowing your neighbors. 

“The number-one thing I always say to community groups, ‘Do you want to survive in a disaster? Well, then you better know your neighbor,’” Lori Peek, director of the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado Boulder told me in our interview for the story. “In the immediate life-saving moment of the disaster unfolding, that’s when our communal ties are exceptionally important. If you’re isolated, no one will know to come rescue you.”

This is shown in the research as well. Daniel Aldrich, professor of political science and director of the Security and Resilience Studies Program at Northeastern University, focuses much of his research on social capital in the face of resilience. And found that building those social bonds are one of the greatest predictors of a person’s resilience during and after a disaster strikes. ““I can’t emphasize enough the idea of networks and a bottom-up resilience that’s based in the community, as opposed to [a movement] based in household behavior,” he told me for this story in The Progressive.

By convening around one specific topic (e.g., emergency preparedness), you’re making way for deeper connections being made between neighborhoods. That’s why today, we’re including practical steps to take to become prepared as a neighborhood.