Earthquake in California this morning
I have had an interesting hour here. I got the information there had been an earthquake in southern California so of course I was on the phone immediately with my daughter. I guess I beat the rush as I was able to get through and find out they were all fine. My grandkids were busy adding toys to their 72 hour kits just in case they need to get out. In the last 10 minutes there have been 8 aftershocks. This is a good time especially if you are in California to consider what you still need to do to be prepared. This earthquake appears to be on a fault that has not been known before and this type of an earthquake can trigger a larger one or increase the pressure on another fault.
According to the news reports a water main has broken and people have been told not to have an open fire of any kind. Cell phones are tied up and the police have asked people not to use their cell phones so that emergency personal can use them. If necessary cell phone towers can be shut down so only emergency personnel can use them but this means people would not be able to call for help. The lesson, have a phone tree. We have activated ours.
Would you explain how your phone tree works during a crises? If you cannot contact someone on the phone tree, then what?
There are many ways to do a phone tree and you have to decide what will work best for your situation. Be aware that during an emergency cell lines will become overwhelmed before land lines. I would therefore recommend you have both cell and land line phone numbers. Choose one person who lives in another area, or at least 50 miles away as the initial contact person. For our family that is me. When a disaster happens the family or families involved report to the contact person as soon as possible. Yesterday I took the initiative and called my daughter and I was glad I had because immediately after that all the lines were tied up and we couldn’t get calls in or out. The contact person has a list of family and friends to call once they have a report on those involved in the emergency. Yesterday we had a daughter and sister living in the earthquake area. They both contacted me and I was then able to call others and let them know all was well. If you have a large list you can choose one person as the contact and that person can then assign another to help with the calling. Don’t forget your contact person may be the one involved in an emergency so they also need someone to act as their contact person. Yesterday not everyone was home when I tried to call them with a report so I left messages on cell phones and land line phones. Then, when they checked their messages, they had a report waiting. If you are doing this for your friends, family, church group, or other localized group, there will need to be one person designated as the coordinator. That person has the lists of everyone in the group and assigns one person the responsibility to contact 5 or more others and then report back. Each group has a list of everyone in their group and should the first person on the list for a group be unavailable the coordinator would call the second person in the group and they would become the group leader. All group leaders will call their reports into the coordinator. Group leaders should leave a message for anyone who was not able to be found, to call the coordinator as soon as they are able to report in. Wow that was long..I hope that helps.