Emergency drills and reunification

The boys came home with a list of items needed for a school earthquake kit yesterday.  It’s all the normal things you would expect, non perishable food items, a juice box, things to keep them going for a few days, in case they can’t be rescued immediately.  That slightly worried me.  I’d just go and collect them, wouldn’t I?  That’s the naïve view in my head anyway.  I can even contemplate thinking about that, even though they’re only a couple of miles away, we might not be able to reach them after a major quake.

What really unnerved me was the request for a recent family photo for ‘reunification’ purposes.  My stomach sort of flip-flopped over that.  The idea of someone using a photo to try and reunite our family is horrifying.  But that, of course, is what is happening in Haiti right now.  Families split apart by the earthquake, trying to reunite.  It’s terrifying to think that we might have an earthquake similar in stature to those experienced in Haiti and Chile recently.  In fact, we’ve apparently had a lot more activity since those quakes.

I had a brief moment of thinking I should prepare an earthquake kit for home.  We came back from camping with a large container of water left over.  I popped it on the shelf in the garage and proudly thought that would be the start of our kit.  After reading a vast list of other supplies, I sort of gave up.  But we have extra water in case we need it.  The other thing I didn’t understand was why would I put all the emergency items in one spot?  What if that’s the place that gets damaged and we can’t reach it?  We’re screwed.  So, I’m going with the idea that food and water scattered around the house is a far better option.

It’s not just earthquakes that the school needs to be prepared for.  We’ve had two tsunami warnings recently, admittedly the waves were only a couple of feet high when they reached us but the warnings were enough to make the school put plans into place.   The school plans to take the children up to the second floor of a nearby building.

So, the children now have fire, earthquake and tsunami drills alongside the ‘Lock Down.’  I found out about ‘lock down’ drills last summer during a baseball game.  We were sitting in the stadium, fans screaming around us, when my son leaned into me and said ‘we’re going to have a lock down drill, in case someone wants to come in and kill us.’  To be fair, this wasn’t how the teacher had described it; this had come from the other children in the class.  But obviously it had been on my son’s mind and he chose the ideal opportunity to sit and have a quiet chat about it.   They’ve since practiced the ‘lock down’ drill, where they all hide so that the classroom looks empty.  They’ve even had a real lock down recently.  That was a fun bike ride home.  ‘Mummy, we had a real lock down today!’ I almost fell off my bike.  But, apparently someone had stolen a car and pulled over next to the school, it’s nice to know the system works.

It’s a wonder the school even has time for lessons with all this disaster preparedness; it must be exhausting keeping on top of it all.  I probably should make more of an effort on our earthquake kit at home, put some canned goods next to the water.  Oh, and a can opener might be a good thing too.

And in a spectacular display of bad parenting, when we heard there was a tsunami on its way, we took our boys down to the beach to see it.  I thought it would be educational!  My husband wrote about it on his blog.