Survival

Residents of Marin county, we are warned, are subject to fire, flood, landslide, and earthquake, and had best be prepared for same. It is a challenge I welcome: scope difficult to determine, candidate solutions unending, deadline as soon as possible, budget minimal. I've been looking forward to this since before our move, though it wasn't until I read in Felix's daycare manual that he is required to have an emergency kit stored in his cubby that I made much of a start.

Years ago (er, twenty years ago) I was on a Search and Rescue team. Among other things it gave me a healthy respect for the casual and merrily baroque ways in which the environment can kill you. (I remember in particular the hiker who, while walking on a level path on a sunny afternoon, tripped on a pebble, hit his head on a rock, and rolled down an embankment into a nearby stream a few inches deep in which, unconscious, he drowned.) Also applicable, it gave me some medical and back-country skills, though both are sorely in need of refreshment. So I have somewhere to start, and about a million pages of Internet material to guide me further ("stop, drop, and post" appears to be the survivalist mantra).

We live on the ground floor across from the local fire station (also town hall and police department: Fairfax is small) so aside from the usual smoke alarm and fire extinguisher preparations I'm not going to worry about fire (though in truth I worry about it quite a bit: our house's wiring is from the Stone Age). There is a slope above our backyard that could well give way, but I don't think there's any scenario under which it would actually sweep our house away, so let's not concern ourselves with that, either.

Flood is a more urgent matter, especially with winter coming on. We live across the street from the San Anselmo Creek which, when it isn't wholly dry, is a nice place to go for an hour's stone-throwing with the boy. Under normal conditions it is inches deep at best. But sometimes it gets out of control (December 2005 being the most recent and notable example) and if and when it overflows its banks it will most assuredly overflow us, too.

More urgent, but a good friend lives up the hill from us, alone in a mansion, and above any conceivable flood level short of a 2012 scenario. Assuming he's happy to provide sanctuary for a day or two, and assuming likewise that we keep our necessaries--photos, computers, vital papers, Thomas the Tank Engine thirty-two-thousand piece train set--in good enough order to evacuate at short notice, I think we may consider this fairly well under control.

And then there are earthquakes. To say we are living on the San Andreas Fault is to exaggerate, but not by much: its northern stretch runs something less than 15 miles from our house at its nearest point. Besides, earthquakes are not strictly confined to faults, nor is the San Andreas the only one that could give us a good shaking. And, of course, the Bay Area is famously overdue for something really catastrophic.

There is something about our house that suggests prostrate vulnerability to even a mild tremor. I take little comfort from the fact that it is old and has presumably survived some shaking. Yes, surely, but it wasn't here in '06, and there are no signs of seismic retrofitting. Unsecured hot water tanks, unbracketed support pillars, plasterwork that somehow communicates itself as structural...architecturally speaking we're totally unprepared. So here's a question: as a renter who doesn't want to be crushed to death in my sleep what do I do about this?

Let's leave aside for the moment the question of the initial survivability of a quake. Let's focus instead on what the aftermath might look like and how to prepare for it. There's no shortage of official advice and though it is dispensed by a byzantine complex of authorities it all comes down to the same thing: have three days' supplies at hand. Here, in the land of eternal Burning Man readiness and Costco runs, it is hard to imagine that most pantries aren't already up to that standard. We're campers, too, and have just bought a station wagon, so our basic shelter needs can be taken as covered.

Or am I being too blase? We do have a camp stove...but not, at the moment, any gas to fuel it. The car has a 600 mile range, but that's on a full tank of course, and there's no diesel to be had in the neighborhood nor, yet, stored in our garage. Yes, we have days and days of food, but that's assuming we're happy to eat dry pasta with raw tomato sauce (which Felix would be, "hard pasta" being a frequent snack request from him). We can survive on limeade, but not wash with it. I bought medical dressings last night, but no medical tape. And all of this stuff resides in the above-mentioned fragile house so the safe bet is that any earthquake bad enough to require its use will also bury it under a pile of rubble.

The right answer is to have disaster-specific stocks, and to store them somewhere safe. Fortunately, we have a ready-made solution: our woodshop, an extremely quaint structure in our backyard that our landlady, uninterested in working wood, has placed at our disposal.


It, too, would likely collapse at 6.0 or above, but there's not much to it so getting at its contents post-quake would pose less of a challenge. Also, unlike the house, it has no gas lines running to it so fire is less likely to strike there. I don't think it ever gets cold enough here to freeze 5 gallon jugs and assuming the food packaging is mouse-proof then I think this will work.

And no, DHS, we will not be preparing for a bio-terror attack.