Are You Ready for a Mega Disaster ?

Mother Nature goes to extremes in the summer, spoiling the gift of good weather with hurricanes, heat waves, fires and floods. This year she started early. On May 2, Cyclone Nargis laid waste to large parts of Myanmar. According to the latest counts, the disaster left 2.4 million people destitute, more than 50,000 missing and at least 84,000 dead. On May 12, China’s Sichuan Province suffered an earthquake measuring 7.9 on the Richter scale. China’s state media reported that more than five million people lost their homes; an estimated 80,000 people, many of them children, were killed. Consider the U.S. in June: Iowa experienced a deluge of historic proportions, with large-scale crop destruction spiking the cost of food and raising fears of an inflationary spiral. California, where the driest two months of spring on record turned grass and brush into kindling, endured more than 1,000 wildfires and braced for more to come. On the East Coast, more than 30 people perished during the kind of heat wave that usually comes in July or August. Is there anything we can do to avert such dangers? These days, of course, extreme weather is only one of the many perils we face. Terrorist attacks or technological accidents involving nuclear weapons; pandemic diseases that cannot be cured; comets and asteroids that could wipe out the human race.

We live in an age of risk assessment and risk analysis, when doomsday scenarios have become daily anxieties, and planning for improbable but world-changing events has become a focus of disaster policy. Now, with disaster season upon us and renewed jitters about a pre-election terrorist attack, government officials and nonprofits are urging us to plan for the next catastrophe... We can (and should) argue about the excesses of our new homeland-security policies, but isn’t developing a household emergency plan something all of us can (and should) do? Improving disaster preparedness is not merely a personal matter. Despite recent government blunders, there are many ways that public agencies and nongovernmental organizations can help. Start with the basics. A home emergency kit should not be a luxury item.