Haiti Earthquake

from http://enews.earthlink.net Port-Au-Prince, Haiti (AP)

Dazed survivors wandered past dead bodies in rubble-strewn streets Wednesday, crying for loved ones... Hospitals, schools, the National Palace, and the main prison had collapsed. The capital's Roman Catholic archbishop was killed when his office and the main cathedral fell. The head of the U.N. peacekeeping mission was missing in the ruins of the organization's multistory headquarters... people with cuts, broken bones and crushed ribs moaned under tent-like covers fashioned from bloody sheets...

The earthquake was on Tuesday, and now, on Friday, the injured dying, and dead, are still lying in the streets waiting for help to come. The United States is sending a hospital ship, but it's not there yet. Help is coming from as far as China and the UK, but it's not there yet. The city of Port Au Prince has gotten some help from the U.N Peacekeeping Military base near by, but it's not nearly enough. It takes time to move the help into action. Ironically, we have the technology to send pictures of the tragedy all over the world in a matter of minutes, but we do not have any way to get help to them that fast - unless help can come from the people who are already there.

BBC News: "Today three thousand bodies were buried in a common grave... As many as 50,000 are believed dead, and 3 million are injured or homeless."

Until very recently, those 3,000 bodies were people. They were human beings living their lives and pursuing happiness just like everybody does. While all those people were lying in the streets for 2 days waiting for help to come, all the other people were wandering helplessly, crying and praying. Any of those, or all of those, could have saved several hundred of those 3,000 people who were buried today, with just the simple knowledge and actions that are in the little Disaster First Aid book. Many of them could have been saved, if somebody who was there knew what to do and could do it quickly, instead of 72 hours later.

When I was writing the first edition of the Disaster First Aid book, I asked some of my friends and colleagues, nurses and doctors in the hospital emergency room where I work, to read it and give me some feedback on it. One of the E.R. doctors said:

"It's common-sense things that would save lives, but most people don't know them."

For the last six months or more I've been noticing that a huge increase in the number of our website visitors are coming from India and the Middle East. We don't ship overseas, so I wanted to find a way to make Disaster First Aid available to them, and came up with the idea of a downloadable Ebook. I have spent the last seven days trying to figure out how to set up a PDF file that can be downloaded on any computer in the world. That was before the Haiti earthquake. Now I am trying even harder, and I am upset and frustrated that my lack of computer technical knowledge doesn't allow me to do it quickly. But I'm getting help from some user forums on the web, and I will get it done.

It will be uploaded to the website: http://www.disasterfirstaid.com with a link to it on the front page of the site. Please check the site and download the book pages for yourself, and tell your friends to do it too.

"This course should be taught in every high school and middle school!"

This was a quote from one of my students, herself a teacher. She's right too - It is unthinkable that we don't do this for our kids and ourselves. We just smugly assume that nothing will ever happen here, or if it does, it won't be very bad. What a foolish assumption. Of course it will. We already know it will, here in California, it's just a matter of when. Seismologists and other scientists have already told us it could happen any day.

Right now mostly private schools teach it, and the majority of those only provide Disaster First Aid training for their teachers and administrators - not for the students. Most public school districts (there are several exceptions) even pre-recession when they had the money to do it, just didn't think it was important.

It would have been extremely important to those thousands of people who had to stand around helpless and crying while they watched their family members, friends, and children bleed, go into shock, and gradually die. Because they didn't know the simple techniques for how to control bleeding, or to prevent or alleviate shock. Things anyone can do, in minutes.

"In a medical crisis, time is often the deciding factor between life and death."

Here's a statistic for you. It's the statistic that got me into this, in the first place:

A study by the American College of Trauma Surgeons researched and classified 3 types of Trauma deaths:
Type-1: Death in minutes from overwhelming damage to body and vital organs.
Type-2: Death in several hours from severe bleeding or shock.
Type-3: Death in days or weeks from infection, organ failure.

The study determined that of those who had a chance to live but died (groups 2 and 3) as many as 40% of them could have been saved by simple first aid measures, IF they received them early.

I wrote the book in 1996, and I've had the website since 2001. Unfortunately I'm a lousy businessperson. I've been doing this for 14 years and have not hit the "break-even-point" yet, let alone made any profit from my book or my course, but at least I know it has saved some lives. But not enough. Not nearly enough. I have been so deeply discouraged, so many times, and vowed to just give it up, because "nobody cares." That is, they don't care until after it's too late. But I can't seem to give it up. Because I care.

It is now more than 72 hours since the disaster suddenly struck Haiti, and help is finally beginning to arrive in Port Au Prince, the capital city. But there are many other cities, and millions of people who still have had absolutely no help of any kind, and are not likely to get any, for days or weeks. Roads are destroyed, there is no water and no food. There are people dying now as you read this. I find this unbearably painful to know.

If you think it can't happen here, you're dead wrong. It WILL happen here. Many of our structures are built better, so some of them will not crumble and fall as fast or as totally as those in Haiti. But buildings and freeways and hospitals will collapse. (Did you know that almost all of the hospitals in the San Francisco Bay Area are built within a mile or less from a major fault line?)

Do you know what to do when minutes make the difference between life and death, and 911 can't come for hours or days? Will that be you, or me, lying in the street this time? Or your girlfriend, boyfriend, your child, your grandchild? How can you not care? Admit it– you do care. You just haven't gotten around to "disaster preparedness" because of all that other important stuff you have to do, and lots of valid reasons...

Download the Disaster First Aid book pages PDF file and tell your neighbors to do it too. (It's a large file and a slow download, so be patient.) Ask the principal and the teachers at your kids school to think about teaching it there. Consider teaching it yourself, at your church, or your club, or at your community college,. The PowerPoint presentation and hands-on practice take just one day, about 6 hours, for the whole course. There is a hardcopy text/handbook and a complete Instructor Manual & Materials How-To package for it. You can get it at the website.

The Ebook pages PDF download is free.

The download link is at - http://www.disasterfirstaid.com If you like it, and you think it's valuable, please consider teaching it.

What is CERT? - Chapter 1

The initials stand for "Citizen Emergency Response Training" and it got started right here in Oakland in 1990 and was actually born out of the revelation of a remarkable man. In 1989 there was a 7.3 earthquake on a fault they didn't know existed. It didn't even have a name, so they named it after a mountain it was near, Loma Prieta. The quake did a lot of damage in Berkeley, San Francisco, and Oakland. The Oakland part was the collapse of more than a mile of the 580 freeway, at the Cypress off ramp in a heavy industrial area of West Oakland. 

The upper whole deck of the freeway just simply and totally collapsed onto the lower deck, crushing all the people and cars below. It happened right at about 5:15, the rush hour, and it would have been much worse, except that so many people had left work early because it was the start of the World Series baseball game in Candlestick Park in San Francisco. It was plenty horrible enough just the same. What does this have to do with C.E.R.T.? I'm going to tell you about that, but first I'm going to tell you about the earthquake.

I was a firefighter then for Alameda County Fire, at home in Berkeley. When the shaking in my house finally stopped (it took a long long long time. It was a 5-OhMyGod earthquake) I went outside to see what the neighborhood looked like. It was all still there. I looked to the south towards downtown Berkeley and saw a huge (I mean HUGE) column of thick black smoke rising from what appreared to be the Shattuck Hotel. 

I got my gear and threw it in the car and headed that way. It took what seemed like forever to get there, even though it was only about 10 blocks, because the streets were jammed with cars and panicked drivers. I got there, put my turnout gear on and reported to the guy in the white hat. (That's the Chief, the Incident Commander - the guy in charge of figuring out what to do, and getting it done - just so you know) 

It wasn't the hotel, it was Hustead's Auto Towing. It was blazing like hell on earth and stuff was exploding inside there all over the place. I told the Chief I was with ALCO OES Fire and said "How can I help?" This is a standard thing to do, by the way. In an off-duty major emergency, you report to a station near where you are, not necessarily your own. And others do the same. That way, everybody's not spending the first hour of a disaster driving around.

The Chief never said a word to me. He acknowledged me with a look and then just started talking into his radio. And a few seconds later an officer way over there by Truck 5 reached out his arm and pointed to me, then yanked it back toward himself in the classic "Get over here" gesture. So I went. The auto shop that was burning was a large parallel-truss building, and the whole roof, about as big as a soccer field, had already flopped like a big pancake onto the 30 or so cars and trucks inside. Hustead's is an auto repair and body shop. It was loaded with things fires love - oxygen tanks, acetelene tanks, gasoline, oil, 55 gallon barrels of paint thinner, and of course, tires burn really good too, with lots of nasty black smoke. All of that stuff was all having a good old time in there.

We couldn't do much but protect the exposures of the houses and buildings nearby. We tried to shoot some water up under the edges of the roof, but not much of it connected with the fire. There was just too much of it, and it was sandwiched in there. The roof-pancake looked like an ocean of melted black tar. 

There were trucks and engines there from BFD stations 1, 2, and 5, and an ambulance - not sure which station it was from. We worked the fire till about 11:30 that night, and then I went back with the engine from station 5 because they offered me dinner, and I was really tired and hungry. We all were. It was not until we got to the station that we heard about the freeway collapse. It was all over the TV news. Fire and ambulance crews were still out there working, including some firefighters and officers from my Fire Department. Crews worked through the night and the next few days, trying to find anybody alive and get them out. All that was going on while we were busy fighting the fire. 

The Oakland Chief who responded to the Cypress Freeway collapse was Battalion Chief Manny Navarro. I didn't meet him that night, but I knew who he was. He was a cool guy, for sure. Almost a year later I did meet him, when he was a guest speaker at a meeting of the California Women Firefighter's Association. He had some very surprising, very down-to earth things to say, that I will never forget. 

The main point he made was that in that horrible incident, most of the lives that were saved, were not saved by the fire engines or the "jaws of life" or even the big, crazily expensive earthmoving machines. They were saved by the people in the neighborhood, who ran out of their houses with clothesline ropes and wooden ladders and crowbars and whatever else they had, and climbed up on that shattered and crumbling dangerous pile of rubble and pulled people out, before the fire engines and police even got there. They were saved by workers from Pacific Pipe and American Steel, with nothing more high-tech than ropes and chains and forklifts. 

And Manny Navarro said "That's when I realized we (the city of Oakland) are spending the money in the wrong place." "We should be training and equipping the people in the neighborhoods, the people who are already there." And that realization was the beginning of C.E.R.T.

Come on back next week for the next chapter of the story.

Don't Call 911

Don't call 911 unless you really need it! There is a pet peeve if I've been wanting to rant and gritch about for years. Two news stories brought it up again this week. In one of them, somebody cut four small cables and totally wiped out all cell phone and land-line phone service to a large area of Santa Clara County California - including all police and Fire Department dispatch functions. At the time of this writing there is still no service and no 911 to call. Just a dead phone-line. There are "no bars" for anybody: Sprint, Verizon, AT&T, and other cell phone company users.

It's possible this could have been done by a disgruntled employee, or just someone who doesn't like cell phones, or just some pathetic individual who wanted to feel powerful by messing up a whole lot of other people he didn't even know. Undoubtedly somebody will say it was a terrorist plot. Whatever it was, there has been no 911 service for about 16 hours now, and it will take a while longer to reconnect the lines by splicing hundreds of fiber optic wires.

The 911 system has surely saved hundreds of thousands of lives, maybe millions. Yet people notoriously misuse and abuse the system. In another story this week on the six o'clock news, they played the actual recording of a 911 call. A woman called 911 from a fast food restaurant to complain that they did not give her "extra shrimp" on her order. It turned out she had bought the food, left the restaurant (probably ate the shrimp) and then returned demanding her money back because she claimed there were no extra shrimp. They wouldn't give her money back, so she called 911. There she is blabbing way on your taxpayer dime, while real calls are waiting to get through.

As outrageous as this seems, people do stupid things like this all the time. 911 service is the life-blood of medical emergency and fire and rescue help to the entire area were you live. Do not call them to tell them, or ask them, about ANY non-life-threatening events. If an earthquake happens, do not call to tell them. THEY KNOW. NEVER call 911 to ask for information of any kind. NEVER call 911 to ask how long it will be till they come. 911 is a dispatch network; its job is to send help were it's needed. While you are wasting a dispatcher's time with unnecessary conversation that you should have called the police department, fire department, or community hotline for, somebody may be dying of a heart attack ,or a fire may be raging through their home. Unless you really need a fire engine and a firefighting crew sent to your home, right now, this instant - DON'T CALL  911. Unless there is a serious, unusual, abnormal medical emergency happening right now, DON'T CALL 911. Unless there is an intruder in your home who you believe is endangering your life and property, or something equally important, DON'T CALL  911.

The fact that your mother-in-law is living with you and won't leave, is NOT A 911 CALL. The problem of your neighbor's dog going to the bathroom on your lawn is NOT A 911 Call. The fact that you saw a news item on TV about a community service and you didn't write down the phone number for it, is NOT A 911 Call.

Whatever you need, IF it is NOT an actual direct life-and-death emergency-in-progress, CALL the non-emergency phone numbers in in the front of your telephone book. Or call the Fire Department public-service line, or call the community information Hotline (411).

You are not the only one. I know that's hard to accept - we have become such an absurdly "me first" society. The majority of people actually believe that they alone are the only one that really matters, and the rest of humanity are just their supporting cast of actors. Wrong. I know it's a shock, but  you're not the only one that matters.  You are not the only one that needs something. You are probably not even the most important one. Next time you're tempted to tie up the precious life-dependent time of a 911 dispatcher operator, just because you sprained your ankle or you got a bad burger, remember - what goes around, comes around.

You may need that dispatcher one of these days. There's a lot of crazy violence in the world. There are fires, floods, tornadoes, and hurricanes. There are heart attacks and strokes and car crashes. There are violent dangerous people, and crazy people who like to assault and kill other people like you for no real reason. You might need that 911 dispatcher some day. Pray you don't get a busy signal because she's dealing with somebody complaining about extra shrimp.

Your comments, questions, and suggestions are welcome.
Speak your mind, we'll listen. Your idea might make a difference.

People Who Just Don't Care - We Sound Off

India, Pakistan and Afghanistan continue to hit our Disaster First Aid website in large numbers of visitors. They seem to hit the Disaster Triage pages first, and then the what-to-do pages. Some visitors download as many as 44 pages. Well, we wanted to help somebody, so I guess you could say our business is a success. We're never made any real income from it, but somehow we're still here.

Got a letter from a doctor in India, wanting to order the Instructor materials "as soon as possible" but she  never did. I think there is a huge need there, but very little money. Same thing in the other areas of the Middle East. There is money in heaps and massive amounts from oil sales, but the people who have it don't care, or don't notice, how the thousands of the innocent are suffering and dying, from the terrorist attacks, from the attacks against the terrorists, and earthquakes on top of that. It really hurts me, to my soul, that this is going on. And on, and on, and on.

Meanwhile most of us here in our comfortable lives just relax in the belief that nothing bad will ever happen here. We've forgotten about the Sept. 11 massacre I guess. And our own UniBomber. And things that blow up, and things that fall down. You would think that every school and every corporation would want to give their teachers or employees a way to help themselves and each other when something terrible happens - like a bombing, or the big California earthquake we all know is coming. 

But somehow it slips our minds as we watch TV or surf the net, play games on our Blackberry, or blabber casually on our cell-phones while absent-mindedly running red-lights at busy intersections. Most people assume "That stuff only happens to other people, in other countries." 

It scares me sometimes. It sure looks like mankind has abandoned the "kind" part of the word, and now, pretty much, nobody cares.

When terrible things happen, they usually happen suddenly. We are all thrown together in a mass of confusion and horror. Your whole world suddenly is totally changed into a battlefield scene where everything around you is twisted and broken, literally unrecognizable. There's soot and dirt and debris of unknown smashed and shattered stuff, and maybe people under it, screaming "Help! Please help me! Dear God, somebody please help me!" 

Other people, maybe you, staggering around dazed and bloody. And there you are, standing there (if you're lucky) or lying there (if you're not). Maybe you're one of those people screaming for help, trapped and painfully crushed under a pile of bricks and beams and twisted steel and concrete.

Now what? You are absolutely helpless, because you just didn't believe anything like this would ever happen, and you were "busy" so you didn't think you or your family or your neighbors or your employer needed to prepare for anything. And besides, if anything ever happened, the clean shiny white ambulance would be right there taking care of you in six minutes or less, right?

Wrong. In a disaster, all bets are off. No ambulances are dispatched until the Disaster Response Plan is in place, and reconnaissance has determined where the greatest and/or most urgent needs are. Your area may not be that. You could be hearing those screams for hours or days, or maybe until they got too weak to scream any more.

It kills me that nobody cares. I can't believe it. If you don't care, believe me, there's not going to be enough miracles for all of the lazy, uncaring people like you to get one, automatically, just in the nick of time, like in the movies. And even though the movies and TV you love to watch these days are packed with horror and violence and death, you're going to find it feels a whole lot different when it's real, and it's you.

We can't fix everything, no one can do that, but if we all, or most of us, or even half of us, do SOMETHING, then there will be someone there who knows how to shore-up and remove that pile of bricks and beams and concrete off of you, and others will help him do it. And others will carefully lift you out of there, directed by somebody in the crowd who knows first aid. And if they know Disaster First Aid, your chances of survival will go up by about 40%, compared to "standard" first aid.

You don't have to buy my book, or teach my course, or ask your kid's school to provide it for their staff. You don't even have to read the free material on the website, or share it with your family and the people where you work. But please, do SOMETHING.

Your comments, questions, and suggestions are welcome. 

Speak your mind, we'll listen. Your idea might make a difference. We also need articles for the LIFE LINES feature column - helpful information or accounts of personal experiences of emergency that might help someone else. We don't mind fixing the grammar, and we don't count off for spelling!

Hope to hear from you.
Peace.
Victoria
 

Is Your Life Worth the Price of a Pizza?

Interesting to me, can't quite get it - why some people do what they do. With all the Fire Departments, Police Departments, Ambulance Companies, Schools, corporations and miscellaneous others who are teaching the Disaster First Aid course, even though we've recommended so in writing, they do not give their students the BOOK. It costs 7.95 list, or 6.95 from the website, less than the price of a pizza, and yet a great many of the folks that we know are teaching the course, are not buying books.

What's up with that?

We don't make any money on the books anyhow, but it's mind-boggling that any Instructor would expect every student to remember every single word from his/her lips, and also be able to instantly memorize every word and picture on the PowerPoint. That's just not the way human beings learn. (Even though I'm sure you are splendid, phenomenal instructors.)

Did your first-grader memorize the whole alphabet the first time he or she saw it and heard it spoken? If so, your child is a genius. Did you pick up algebra the first day of class? Once a human being has had some new learning presented to them, and they've done one exercise of it, they still need a reliable source of review to reinforce what they've learned. Otherwise it will fade.

What are you doing, instructors? Are you just pushing the button / showing the PowerPoint, and calling it done? Shame on you! Or are you xeroxing the book that comes with the instructor kit and materials? That is against Federal copyright law. And you know that. It says so right on the cover. Again, shame, shame on you!

In this age of speed, greed, and instant gratification, some of us are throwing away the traditional ways that work, just to make it fast and easy. And then calling it done. You really should at least feel a little bit guilty about that. A DFA handbook for every learner's first aid kit only makes sense. I bet if you asked them straight out "Is your life worth the price of a pizza? How about your kid's lives?"  They would probably say yes. And by the way, you can't even find a good pizza for 6.95 these days.

Matt Mc

How Can We Get Disaster First Aid training into Schools?

Dear friends of DFA -

I haven't been writing here like I should, so much has been going on - a historic election and a new beginning for our country and our world, and many holidays for many faiths, as well as the winter solstice - the shortest day and longest night are over, and now we begin the upward climb to light once again. I believe the New Year will bring hope and new dedication to what's right, as well as work to heal what's wrong, with this country we love and live in.

More earthquakes have been happening all over the world. My heart is so torn by the terrible suffering in the Middle East, as if they didn't have enough troubles without earthquakes too. In California, we are having more little ones, which tend to make most people more complacent. "Oh it's nothing - just another earthquake!" "Hahaha." One of these days it will be the Big One though, and I do worry about that. Recent strong activity on the San Andreas fault has got seismologists worrying too.

Lately we've been getting an unusually large number of website visitors surfing from India. About 80% of visits, for several weeks. I was just asking myself "What's that about?" when the Mumbay hotel Taj Mahal terrorist attack happened.

When we were teaching the Disaster First Aid classes in neighborhoods back in the 1990's many of our students and parents said on their Course Evaluation forms that  "This course should be taught in every High School and Middle School." We agree. It is so basic and so do-able by virtually anybody from age 14 to 70.

And it is being taught (to faculty and administrators mostly) at some private schools, but public schools have so many rules and restrictions and paperwork that it's extremely difficult and frustrating to try to get DFA into public schools. But private and charter schools can do whatever they want, and any group of teachers, employers,  or virtually anyone can set up a class for themselves "on their own time" with the Instructor Kit materials and PowerPoint, just to be ready when the time comes. Even though we all hope and pray it won't come in our lifetime, we all know it probably will. (The odds just went up again; now it's a 90% probability.) 

So we are planning to send out some letters of introduction to a mailing list of schools, school districts, and private school systems which (by our stats reports) have visited our website. The letters will include a brochure and some information about just exactly what Disaster First Aid is, and why it's very different from "Standard" or any other kind of First Aid. We hope that this will help get more people trained in this simple but critical essential information that has so much absolute potential to save thousands of lives. This year's slogan, written by my next-door neighbor:  "Be a part of the Help, instead of the helpless."

If you would personally like to know more about DFA, of if you know of any schools, maybe the ones where YOUR kids go, that might be interested in a one-day training course like this, please send us their snail-mail address for our mailing list. If you know the name of the person who would be the best to send it to, please include that too. And of course they can also visit the website http://www.disasterfirstaid.com

We are looking forward to a better new year. It may not be easy, but it's more important than ever for some of the old-fashioned ideas and values to come back in style - Like neighbors helping neighbors, and families helping families, and if you don't know your neighbors, maybe this is a good time to meet them. When it All Falls Down, you will need them as much as they need you.

Hello and welcome to the DFA blog.

This course, Disaster First Aid, has been around since 1996. 

That's when the book was written and self-published. I was teaching it in the San Francisco Bay area where I live, and I wrote the book for a teaching aid. But things grew, and stuff started happening in the Middle East, and earthquakes even happened in London,  and I realized I wasn't doing enough. For one thing, there wasn't anything else like this out there, and even now, in 2008, there still isn't anything that really addresses the needs of disaster first-help by the people who are already there. 

Disaster Response agencies are still set up like there will be enough professional rescuers, but everybody knows there obviously won't. If you live in a city like Berkeley California, where The Big Quake is always just a clock-tick away, there are usually about seven or eight ambulances on duty to respond to 911 calls. But if there is an earthquake (excuse me, WHEN there is an earthquake) there will surely be more than 7 or 8 people seriously injured. (Do the math.) What about the rest of us? Public Safety Agencies have been telling us ever since 1989 that we should be prepared to be "on your own" for the first 24 hours to three days. 

You've probably heard of "the Golden Hour."  That's the window in which most deaths due to trauma occur. If the seriously injured can get medical help within that hour, they have a good chance of not dying. The American College of Emergency Surgeons did a study in 1984 of thousands of trauma deaths, and they found some startling statistics. From that study emerged the S.T.A.R.T. system of rapid disaster triage (it's in the DFA book) and those statistics are what started me on this Disaster First Aid path in the first place.

Those statistics found that of the seriously injured who had a chance to survive (not counting those who were so badly damaged they had no chance) of those who had a chance but died, 40% of them could have been saved by simple correct first aid measures - IF DONE EARLY - within the first minutes or hour after the injury event. Bottom line: Wherever you are when disaster hits, even if 911 can't come, YOU are already there. You can do these simple but critical lifesaving things. Anybody from about age 14 to 75 can.

Standard first aid will not help much, since it does not have S.T.A.R.T. rapid triage, and every basic or standard first aid instruction says "Do such and such and then call 911 or go to the Emergency Room." Neither of those will be options in a disaster. (see Why Isn't Standard First Aid Good Enough? at the site www.disasterfirstaid.com/NOTstandard.html).  

I work in an ER (for nearly 20 years) and I can tell you that right now on an ordinary weekday with nothing special going on, the wait to be seen by a doctor averages from 2 to 6 hours. Of course, life-threatening cases are taken first, and immediately if we can. Sometimes that means people already in the highest acuity rooms have to get yanked out into the hallway, to make a space for the new incoming high-acuity patients. And there's only so much hallway ... 

When there is a disaster, ERs will be flooded with people - (picture it: rock concert stampede) and streets will be jammed so you couldn't get there anyway. Plus, remember that all of the hospitals in the Alameda County are within one mile of one or several of the major active earthquake faults. Hospitals will be damaged and some may have to be shut down. All our patients in the hospital and the ER will be moved out into the street. My advice: in a disaster, you do not want to get swallowed up in that.

What to do? Well, I won't try to go into all that right now, but we'll be talking about it over time, here in this blog. If you want to know what it's about, you could look at the website. (Start with the home page and then go to  /actionoutline.html and maybe /rapidtriage.html). 

If you are an EMT, Paramedic, nurse, or teacher, you should seriously consider teaching it in your area. If you want more information, it's on the website. I don't want this blog to turn into an advertisement for the website, but there is a lot of authoritative, accurate, free information there, that you can download for yourself or your group if you want to. 

This Disaster First Aid course and the website are not basically a commercial venture, this is a humanistic venture. When it All Falls Down, the government is not going to be able to do everything all at once, for all of us at once, fast enough. We will have no choice but to help ourselves and each other. The message of Disaster First Aid is how you (or anyone) can do that, in the area of medical help and survival. 

There are lots of books and websites about other disaster preparedness things - like how to store food and water (extremely important!) and what kind of flashlight and batteries. But I have honestly not found, in more than 10 years, anything else remotely like this Disaster First Aid course. You can look for yourself. There are courses called something like that, but they turn out to be just basic or standard first aid with a disaster "spin." And to take the Red Cross "Disaster First Aid" course, you must first prove you have already taken a CERT-type training series, including their disaster first aid. (I got that info from their website.)

In surfing, I found several sites that called their services "disaster first aid" but turned out to have a lot of tricky language but nothing actually to offer for help or information. Iin fact, one site was a ComputerRepair Service! I've found websites that suggest help, but they turn out to be commercial sites manipulating our fears and selling absurdly useless first aid kits with itty-bitty band-aids for outrageously expensive prices. (We strongly suggest you build your own FA Kit, and there is a list of our recommended contents in the book, and even a pattern for making a nifty "tool-roll" carrying bag for them.

Your comments, questions, and suggestions are requested and welcomed here. We also need articles for the LIFE LINES feature column about helpful information, or accounts of personal experiences of emergency that you think might be helpful to someone else. We don't mind fixing the grammar, and we do not count off for spelling.

Hope to hear from you.

Peace.

Victoria