Something bad is going to happen, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it.

Preparing to deal with a disaster is like going off of a ski jump. If you put off your planning until things start happening, it’s far too late to make much of a difference. Once you’re headed down that ski jump, the time for planning and preparation is over.

On the other hand, being prepared for disaster does not have to be time-consuming or expensive. In this multi-part series of DailyKos Diaries, I will share with you, dear reader, many of the lessons I’ve learned regarding the most effective ways to prepare for an emergency.

This is the first installment in a multi-part series on personal disaster preparedness. Your humble correspondent is a Silicon Valley technical executive with both professional and personal experience in risk assessment and disaster-readiness planning. Links to reference materials, including planning guides and reference information, will be found at the end of the final Diaries in this series.

Tornados pose a constant threat to Middle Tennessee

Series Index: Are YOU ready for disaster?

1. Assess your risks!
2. Plan to survive! (part A)
3. Plan to survive! (part B)
4. Emergency gear and supplies
5. Material preparations continued; Conclusion

When disaster strikes, will you be prepared?

Despite what you may have gathered from reading guides to readiness from the government, the Red Cross, or other organizations, you should not begin with a spending spree at the local hardware store. When you strip away all of the bureaucrat-speak, there are three basic steps you must follow to be ready for disaster:

1. Assess
2. Plan
3. Prepare

In this installment, we will discuss step 1, assessment of risks.

The psychology of disaster preparedness

In order to effectively prepare for disaster without becoming overwhelmed, you must be able to make realistic judgments about risks. On one hand, it is an effort for most people to “think the unthinkable”, to contemplate scenarios which are far outside the routine of their daily lives. It is difficult for most people to imagine a world where fresh water does not flow from the taps, electricity is something you can’t take for granted, and the grocery store shelves are empty… assuming the stores are even open.

On the other hand, there’s a phenomenon I think of as the “armageddon fallacy”. This is the temptation, once that our Pandora’s Box of fears and concerns has been opened, to imagine extremely unlikely events as real threats. We must be cautious to exercise good judgment when considering risks, as the “armageddon fallacy” is a surprisingly easy trap to fall into. Keep in mind that your plan, at some point, will be shared with friends and family. This incents most people to stay clear of the Crazy Talk Express to Armageddon Town when making a plan.

Assessing your risks: take a look around

Each city, state, and region of the country has its own unique set of risks. For example, your humble correspondent’s home in Fremont, California is unlikely to be threatened by a hurricane — but that home is only a few miles from the Hayward Fault, and surprisingly, is in a “dam failure inundation area”. Many homes in America are subject to hidden or unseen dangers such as this; in the Southwest, for example, the dangers of flash floods in an otherwise arid environment are well known, yet people die (surprised, in many cases) in flash floods every year. (Editor’s Note: Clarksville lies in the flood zone for a potential failure of Kentucky’s Wolf Creek Dam).

Your first task in building a disaster-readiness plan is to assess the risks particular to the areas where you spend significant time. In America’s car-centric suburban culture, many people work 20 miles or more from their home. The risks at work and at home may differ considerably, and should be assessed separately.

Here is a brief listing of risk categories you may find useful in putting together your list of potential emergencies in your area:

• Domestic risks (house fire, carbon monoxide, medical emergency)
• Industrial accident risk (refineries, chemical plants, rail lines transporting hazardous cargo such as liquified chlorine)
• Natural disasters (heat waves, forest/grassland fires, earthquakes, floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, tsunamis)
• Secondary disaster risk due to primary natural disaster (e.g. the reservoir dam which may fail in an earthquake and flood Fremont)
• Civil disturbance (riots, terrorist attacks, acts of war)

These risks are listed in the order in which you should consider them. Please note the “civil disturbance” category is last — this is because one of the principal goals of any disaster plan should be to minimize your exposure to civil-disturbance risks. The next installment of this series will discuss the use of risk-avoidance strategies in detail.

A good source for risk information is your city or state Office Of Emergency Services website, or its equivalent. Other good sources for detailed risk information include the following local resources:

• building permit authority
• fire department
• police department and/or sheriff’s office

There exists one more category of risk which you must consider: risks to your freedom of movement. As you go about your business for the next week, consider the following:

• Do you know of any alternate routes between work and home?
• Does your primary route include bridges or tunnels
• Does your primary route pass under any high-voltage power lines?
• Do you regularly drive past refineries, chemical plants, or rail lines carrying tank cars?
• Does your neighborhood have above- or below-ground power distribution?
• If you need to leave your city or region, how many routes can you think of without consulting a map?
• Do you have reasonably current paper map of your region in each of your family vehicles?

Homework time!

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to make a list of as many disaster risks as you can think of. Get your significant other or your kids involved, and make it a competitive event. Be lenient, at first, when considering whether something is a likely risk. Be sure to include all of the places where you might find yourself when disaster strikes — home, work, school, church, shopping, and so forth. Don’t consider the list closed until you’ve visited each of these places and looked, with a critical eye, at the risks we all ignore on a daily basis.

NEXT TIME: Phase 2 of increasing your preparedness: put together a plan for dealing with the risks you consider likely in your locale.

Update [2005-9-9 16:50:27 by AlphaGeek]: By popular demand, expanded the not-intended-to-be-comprehensive list of natural disasters. Added heat wave, forest/grassland fires, and tsunamis.

At approximately 4:36 a.m this morning, a 5.4 magnitude earthquake located near Gards Point Illinois rattled buildings and caused minor damage. The quake was felt as far as the Chicago area, and even into Arkansas. The earthquake was easily felt in Clarksville, Tennessee as it was reported by multiple callers to 911, and by police officers over the public safety radio system.The quake occurred on a fault line adjacent to the New Madrid fault.

The New Madrid has been quiet for over a century, but is notorious for its devastating clusters of quakes in 1811-1812.

Here’s some information on the quake from the USGS Web site.

There have been 2000+ reports from people feeling the quake around the country, with a few from Clarksville.

Earthquakes are one of multiple scenarios that Clarksville area emergency preparedness officials, including the Red Cross, prepare and train for.

Here’s a little bit of history on the New Madrid seismic area:

The New Madrid Seismic Zone is made up of reactivated faults that formed when North America began to split or rift apart during the breakup of the supercontinent Rodinia in the Neoproterozoic Era (about 750 million years ago). The resulting Midcontinent Rift System failed but remained as a scar or zone of weakness. The area was then flooded by an ancient ocean, depositing layers of sediment on the rift. Since the 1970s, thousands of earthquakes have been recorded in the New Madrid seismic zone.

In 1974, instruments were installed in and around the area to monitor seismic activity. Since then, more than 4,000 earthquakes have been recorded, most of which are too small to be felt. On average, one earthquake per year is large enough to be felt in the area.

In studying maps of quake epicenters, two trends are apparent. First is the general northeast-southwest trend paralleling the trend of the Reelfoot Rift. The second is the intense cross trend (northwest to southeast) that occurs just southwest of New Madrid. This second trend coincides with an intrusive igneous body which lies deeply buried beneath the sediments of the rift zone. Several other bodies of deeply buried intrusive rock are known to exist within the seismic zone. The depths of these igneous rock bodies closely corresponds to the depth of the seismic activity.
1811/1812 earthquake series

Looking at those early 1800 quakes:
* December 16, 1811, 0815 UTC (2:15 a.m.); 7.7 magnitude; epicenter in northeast Arkansas. It caused only slight damage to man-made structures, mainly because of the sparse population in the epicentral area. However, landslides and geological changes occurred along the Mississippi River, and large localized waves were caused by fissures opening and closing below the Earth’s surface.

* December 16, 1811, 1415 UTC (8:15 a.m.); 7.0 magnitude; epicenter in northeast Arkansas.This shock followed the first earthquake by six hours.

* January 23, 1812, 1500 UTC (9 a.m.); 7.6 magnitude; epicenter in the Missouri Bootheel. The meizoseismal area was characterized by general ground warping, ejections, fissuring, severe landslides, and caving of stream banks.

* February 7, 1812 (the New Madrid Earthquake), 0945 UTC (4:45 a.m.); 7.9 magnitude; epicenter near New Madrid, Missouri. New Madrid was destroyed. At St. Louis, Missouri, many houses were damaged severely, and their chimneys were thrown down. The meizoseismal area was characterized by general ground warping, ejections, fissuring, severe landslides, and caving of stream banks.

Geologic effects of the New Madrid quakes:

Large areas sank into the earth, fissures opened, lakes permanently drained, new lakes were formed, and forests were destroyed over an area of 150,000 acres (600 km²). Many houses at New Madrid were thrown down. “Houses, gardens, and fields were swallowed up,” one source notes. But fatalities and damage were low, because the area was sparsely settled.

The earthquakes were felt as far away as New York City and Boston, Massachusetts, where churchbells rang.

This series of temblors caused permanent changes in the course of the Mississippi River, which appeared to flow backward. Because of the change in the course of the Mississippi River, land was cut off from counties by the river and wound up on the other side of the new riverbed, on the other side of the Mississippi. The settlement of Reverie, Tennessee, in Tipton County was cut off and placed on the western bank of the Mississippi River on the Arkansas side.

Along the Tennessee/Arkansas state line, geological features are still present almost 200 years after the events, showing the former course of the Mississippi River as it was before the 1811/1812 earthquakes.

The potential for the recurrence of large earthquakes and their impact today on densely populated cities in and around the seismic zone has generated much research devoted to understanding earthquakes. Establishing the probability for an earthquake of a given magnitude is an inexact science. By studying evidence of past quakes and closely monitoring ground motion and current earthquake activity, scientists attempt to understand their causes, recurrence rates, ground motion and disaster mitigation. This is the potential impact area of the New Madrid fault:

The probability of magnitude 6.0 or greater in the near future in the New Madrid fault area is considered significant; a 90% chance of such an earthquake by 2040 has been given. In the June 23, 2005, issue of the journal Nature, the odds of another 8.0 event within 50 years were estimated to be between 7 and 10 percent.

Because of the unconsolidated sediments which are a major part of the underlying geology of the Mississippi embayment, as well as the river sediments along the Mississippi and Ohio River valleys to the north and east (note the red fingers extending up these valleys in the image above), large quakes have the potential for more widespread damage than major quakes on the west coast. Additionally, the area affected will be larger since beyond the rift zone itself there are few other faults to attenuate the seismic waves.

Source material from Wikipedia