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PEP-C has some pretty good ideas and thoughts that should be passed along too - at least I think they should. ;)

Family Drills

Planning is important, but rehearsal is vital. Rehearsals test your plans and help you to identify flaws in those plans. Rehearsal is simply pretending you and your family have just experienced a major disaster and acting accordingly. The following are some examples of “drills” that you can try:

* Live for a weekend without electricity. You can do this for real by shutting off the breaker (to prevent cheating) or the easy way by just “pretending.” If you decide to run this drill the easy way, set a “fine” for each violation of the rules. Make the “fine” something fun or monetary or both. (But not so fun that everyone cheats on purpose!) This drill will teach you that boiling water over a camp stove or a fire in the back yard just to make your morning coffee can really wreck your normal morning routine. But hopefully the drill will also help you identify missing supplies, bad ideas and be the springboard to a better plan.
* Evacuate your family to another location over a weekend. Visit a friend or book a motel room that’s at least 100 miles away from your current location. Give your family 20 minutes to pack and take off, ready or not. Once you’ve reached your destination, make a list of everything you forgot to bring and then add it to your emergency evacuation bag. Once you’ve settled in at your destination, take a minute to think about and discuss how you would feel if everything you left behind was destroyed in a fire. Or how you would feel if everything below the second floor of your home was damaged or destroyed by a flood. These reflections will give rise to ideas of how you can revise your storage and survival plans.
* Take your family for a drive on a Saturday afternoon in the fall. Pull over in a remote area (as long as its safe to do so) and spend the night there with only the supplies on hand in your car. By morning you’ll know exactly what you should have in your car kit as well as what is rather useless.
* Try eating only your survival foods for a weekend - or, if you’re really brave, do it for a whole week. This is an excellent drill to conduct if you’re ready to rotate and replace your emergency food supplies. It will also help you identify any menu selections you just can’t stand as well as those items you want to add to your stash (including recipes).

These are just a few examples of what you can do as a family to test your preparedness plans. Be creative. Come up with your own unique scenarios. Execute them and then let us know what you did and how it fared. We’d love to add yours to the list for others to try.

A few tips to go with the preparedness drill:

# Plan your drills so they have value to your family. Look at your emergency plans based on what actually could happen. What would you do in the event of a loss of electrical power when computers were down and you lost phone communication? If you live in a high-crime area, it’s worth having a security drill. Think about what you would do if a water main breaks. At minimum, plan for an earthquake drill, a fire drill and an evacuation drill.
# Pay attention to the number of drills and the timing of them. List the drills that will benefit your family. Then pull out a calendar and schedule these drills over a 12 month period so that each drill is conducted at least once during the upcoming year.
# Assign responsibility for emergency preparedness drills so they get done. Typically, one person will be your family’s “drill” sergeant and that person should execute the drills when they are calendared. That doesn’t mean one person must do all the tasks, but he or she can delegate responsibilities.
# If your neighborhood is organized, piggyback your family drills onto neighborhood drills.
# Incorporate evaluation processes into each of your drills. Come up with recommendations on how to modify your family plans based on what you learn from the drill. If you execute your drills with an eye toward learning you will learn something.
# Just do it.

Excellent family drills.

I have read where several camped in the back yard for a weekend and were amazed at what they wished they had remember to bring.

So few really have the concept of what it is all about and how quickly a bomb or toronado can take away all your supplies.

In the attic is too hot for them and roof may blow off and in the basement it may flood.

There is no place 100% safe for storage.