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Earthquakes, fire, floods, hurricanes. Disasters and their aftermaths are older than humanity.
Add to this mixture terrorism, nuclear weapons, wars, and it is not an exaggeration to say that disaster might be around the corner or minutes away. The Asian tsunami, 9/11, and Hurricane Katrina were given wide media attention and underscored the need for survival skills and preparedness. The Boy Scout motto "Be prepared" applies to everyone.
The pre-assembled emergency preparedness kit is a specialty item that has emerged to meet the needs of an emergency conscious population.
"You could spend weeks or months finding all the products that go into these kits," said Chris Stephens, president of Security Omni Corporation, a Seattle, Washington-based company that assembles emergency kits that retail from $12.95 to $280 depending on their contents.
Food and water are the most basic items, and an Omni survival kit contains water packets and food bars to sustain several people for up to five days, depending on the size of the kit. The food bars are from Mayday and each contains 3200 calories and all essential vitamins and minerals.
Other essential items in kits include ponchos, small tents, Mylar blankets and first aid supplies. Higher end kits have dynamo-powered flashlights and either a solar powered or hand crank-operated radio. Stephens stocks the kits with products from a variety of manufacturers.
His customers include retailers, law enforcement organizations, businesses, and government agencies. He provided numerous kits to rescue workers during Hurricane Katrina, but Stephens notes that larger companies were involved in the Katrina rescue effort.
"It was hard to compete with them," he said.
Stephens notes that his kits are priced so that his retailers can make $100 margin on the $280 kit.
"Safety is a number one concern for most people but few people do anything about it," he said. "Our $280 kit can keep a family of four alive for five to six days. What kind of price can you put on survival?"
Perhaps nowhere else in the country is emergency preparedness more emphasized than in Utah, where schools are required to keep an emergency kit in the classroom for every child.
"We are in a high earthquake environment," said Vicky Berry of General Army and Navy in Salt Lake City. "Its not an if kind of thing but a when kind of thing."
Berry assembles kits for school children and adults. Kits are priced from $20 to $300.
"People keep kits in cars, offices and homes," said Berry, "Kits are a big thing in Utah. You can make them as elaborate as you want."
If a child's parents cannot afford a kit, the local PTA will supply one from volunteer donors. A school child's kit contains emergency food and water, a Mylar blankets, a poncho and light sticks.
In addition, each kit contains a letter from the child's parents and family photographs to comfort him or her and some kind of activity such as coloring books and crayons.
Although Berry supplies adult kits with a variety of food, including food bars, dehydrated food and MREs, parents generally select the food for children's kits because of the prevalence of allergies in children.
She notes that the food bars by Mayday, which were originally designed by the US Navy, require having a large amount of water on hand.
"If you don't drink a lot of water you should stay clear of these because they become constipating after four or five days," Berry said.
Adult kits usually contain a few days' worth of water packets and either a water purifier or water purification tablets. A small bottle of iodine tablets will purify up to twenty-five quarts of water.
A driving force behind the preparedness movement in Utah is the Church of the Latter Day Saints, better known as the Mormon Church.
"The LDS Church pushes preparedness," said Berry. "The church wants everybody to have a kit and be prepared for anything that might happen. Whenever something hits around the world, like Iraq or Katrina, people here come to emergency preparedness stores and stock up."
Berry sums up the church's preparedness philosophy: "We teach people not to count on the government. It's not their responsibility to bail you out of an emergency."
Every LDS ward, which includes all residents, Mormon and non-Mormon, forms a Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) that is trained in rescue operations and procedures.
Courses, workshops and fairs in preparedness are a major activity in Utah, said Berry, who teaches a free, monthly course at the General Army and Navy store and teaches other preparedness workshops and courses throughout the state. Almost every weekend, she notes, there is at least one emergency preparedness fair in the Salt Lake City area.
"We want to let people know what's out there and what's available and we want people to be prepared," Berry said. "We want everybody to know all the do's and the don'ts and the don'ts are just as important as the do's."
As an example of a don't, Berry mentions the danger of turning on a light switch or a flashlight that is not intrinsically safe during an earthquake or at any time when there is a suspected gas leak.
"A spark can blow up your house and kill a family and kill your neighbors," said Berry, who advises using light sticks or a flashlight that is totally sealed and has a large separation between the switch and the source of the light, such as a Mag-Light.
Every year Berry teaches at a fair held by the city's blood bank and makes certain that all employees have kits ready at their desks and that their families have kits at home.
"The whole city is ready," she said.
Although Perry Hitt, president of NBC Safety, sells MRE's, water, Mylar blankets and other standard disaster supplies, his company specializes in preparedness for nuclear, biological or chemical emergencies.
Hitt compares having items like potassium iodide tablets and a radiation detector on hand to wearing a seatbelt in a car.
"I've never been in a major accident, but I still wear a seatbelt. The few minutes it takes to put on is worth the effort," he said.
Hitt notes that an assortment of emergency supplies in a home probably costs less than the average DVD collection.
One of the first products NBC offered when the company changed its focus from industrial to personal safety soon after 9/11 was potassium iodide tablets, which remain a major product.
Although potassium iodide does not protect the entire body from the effects of radiation following a nuclear attack or accident, it protects the thyroid, which is particularly vulnerable to radiation damage.
Hitt also sells handheld radiation detectors, which give off a signal in the presence of radioactivity. The detectors also measure the amount of radiation.
Food and water can be contaminated by radiation, and Hitt notes that there is a possibility that surplus coming from the former Soviet Union might be tainted with radioactivity from Chernobyl. The handheld detectors, which retail from $200-$300, are useful items for an army/navy store to stock, Hitt said.
author: BY HOWARD PROSNITZ