Many of us unprepared to handle a natural disaster: survey
Posted May 8, 2017 7:52 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) – It is Emergency Preparedness Week across Canada but a new survey finds many of us aren’t ready to withstand Mother Nature’s wrath.
“It [survey] shows 51 per cent of Canadians feel they’re prepared. But the astonishing thing is that just over 30 per cent (34 per cent) actually have a kit of some kind to get themselves through an infrastructure disruption or natural disaster,” explains Vancouver Fire and Rescue Services Captain Jonathan Gormick, detailing the results of the Duracell survey.
The veteran firefighter calls the results surprising. “It is surprising because a kit is so easy to put together. There are plenty of retailers that sell pre-built kits but it’s very easy to put one together yourself. It’s a low time investment and a low cost investment but will payoff [with] huge dividends if disaster ever strikes for you and your family,” says Gormick.
When putting that kit together, he says the thing we often forget or take for granted, is something we all need. “Probably fresh water is what we tend to forget. We’re surrounded by water, we’re never really in short supply of water but people tend to forget that in the Lower Mainland, all of our domestic water comes from the North Shore Mountains. And it has to go through pretty big mains [pipes] that run large distances,” he says, adding they’d likely sheer off and stop delivering water during an earthquake, which is why a 72-hour-supply is a necessity in any emergency kit.
Younger Canadians are more likely to be among the just under two-thirds of us who do not have an emergency preparedness kit in our homes, according to the survey.
Gormick says many of us are ignoring the obvious warning signs. “I’m a little surprised because we have had some gentle reminders of maybe not a massive earthquake but, we’ve had several power outages including one in 2015 that was a couple of days. Fortunately the weather was nice and that made it easy for people to get through. I thought that, plus the earthquake in late 2015 would have been gentle reminders for people to get prepared for when something more severe happens.”
British Columbians are the most likely to be prepared compared with the rest of the country, while the survey also found older Canadians are much more likely to have an emergency kit compared to younger ones.
