 Hello, everyone. Good evening. My name is Julie Backer, and I'm a librarian at West Vancouver Memorial Library. Welcome to Emergency Preparedness Basics, a webinar with Jocelyn Houston of North Shore Emergency Management. This presentation tonight is part of the library's recognition of emergency preparedness week. My colleagues and I were discussing what programs to offer during 2022 after 2021, which let's face it was a horrible year on many fronts. We chose dual themes, particularly in light of the ongoing climate crisis. Those two themes are preparedness and hope. Today's talk definitely checks the preparedness box, but I think it's also a hopeful talk. I attended this lecture with Jocelyn earlier this year, and it spurred me to start preparing for an emergency, which has lessened my anxiety levels, and that is hopeful. Thanks to Jocelyn's inspiration, I've now started putting together grab-and-go bags both at the office and at home, and I'm just going to dive down under my desk here. I have my partially completed grab-and-go bag all ready to go here at work. I add new things every month. Before we begin, a few housekeeping details. Today we will be using the closed caption feature for the hearing impaired. The program is automatically transcribed by Zoom, so please understand that it may not be a perfectly accurate transcription, especially with less common words. If you want to see the closed captioning, you will need to enable it by pressing the CC Live Transcript button in the menu area where you see the Mute button and all the other options. This is a webinar, so while you can see and hear us, we cannot see or hear you. Please do not use the chat or raise hand features. There is a Q&A option on your bottom menu bar, and you may use that feature to type in any questions you may have whenever you have them. We encourage you to do so throughout Jocelyn's lecture. I'll be monitoring the questions throughout the talk and ask them of Jocelyn as time permits after her talk. You can also contact me through the Q&A if you're having any technical issues. I'll attempt to assist you once Jocelyn has begun speaking. This event is being recorded and will be available on the West Vancouver Memorial Library YouTube channel. I'll be sure to send it out to all registered participants sometime next week in case you'd like to refer to a particular point or share the lecture with others. I'm now going to turn the virtual stage over to Jocelyn Houston, the Public Education Coordinator for North Shore Emergency Management. Jocelyn is a fierce supporter of the importance of personal emergency preparedness and is thrilled to regularly connect with members of the public to promote this. She has been a driving force behind MSEM's recent launch of Alertable, the North Shore's Free Emergency Notification System. Jocelyn lives in North Vancouver with her family. Her neighbors know how much water she has stored in her garage and are always very nice to her. Jocelyn, over to you. Thank you very much, Julie. Thanks so much for having North Shore Emergency Management. We are thrilled to be here, particularly during Emergency Preparedness Week and it's great to have such a positive turnout. So I am the Public Education Coordinator for North Shore Emergency Management. We'll take about the next 40 minutes to do an overview on the steps that you can take to get better prepared in the event of an emergency. No matter where you're at in your preparedness journey, whether you're just getting started or a seasoned prepper, I'm hoping that you'll be able to take away a few tips tonight. So if you aren't familiar with the North Shore Emergency Management Office, we are the Emergency Management Arm for the three North Shore municipalities. So if you live on the North Shore, we are a part of your local municipal government. We're located in the RCMP building that you can see on the picture here, and our main is to support North Shore citizens in preparing for, responding to, and recovering from emergencies. So I wanted to start our presentation by telling you a little bit about Alertable. This is our emergency notification system, not to be confused with Alert Ready, which is the provincial system that was tested today at 1.55pm. So Alertable was launched by North Shore Emergency Management about one year ago. Well, it's an app. It's free. It's something that you subscribe to, which is different than the Alert Ready that happened today where you don't subscribe to it. So we would use this to issue alerts to anyone who's registered whenever there's the possibility of a life-threatening situation. One of the examples of that would be evacuation, shelter in place, severe weather, natural disasters, etc. So who should use Alertable? Well, anybody who lives on the North Shore, travels through the North Shore, visits people on the North Shore, our objective is to absolutely increase the number of users. It's really simple to sign up, simply download the app from your favorite app store, or if you would like to receive your alerts through either text or email, social media. If you can go to the URL you see at the bottom of the slide, nscm.ca slash alertable, the directions there will guide you through how to sign up for one of those other options. So let's talk about preparedness and start with that very big question, why prepared? Why is it important to get prepared? We know that people who are prepared tend to be more resilient. If there is a significant event, it will take time for the authorities to be able to help the general community. We don't need to look after ourselves and our families for a minimum of 72 hours or even up to a week. Your most important resource is you. How do we get prepared? Three simple steps. The first is to understand the hazards in the geographical area where we live. So let's start with your plan, which is basically like your playbook, such as how will you communicate. And then finally, preparing a kit, gathering the supplies that you would need to make yourself comfortable, your family comfortable for 72 hours and possibly up to a week. So let's start with the first one, understanding your hazards. What is a hazard? Well, it's a danger or a risk. We may not be able to stop a hazard from occurring, but if we understand it and prepare for it, we can possibly reduce the impact. There are lots of hazards in the world. The hazards that we face here on the North Shore are very different than what others face in different parts of the world. For example, this is a sandstorm approaching in the Middle East, a swarm of locusts in Africa. People prepare for this very differently than preparing for, say, heavy rainfall warning or windstorm. So when we understand the hazards that we might face here, we can better prepare for them. What hazards do we face on the North Shore? Let's take a close look. Up front and center, extreme weather, so typical of British Columbia, particularly during the winter storm season. We live in this geographically diverse and beautiful area, oceans, mountains, freshwater rivers, but the geography lends itself to several natural hazards. Headlines we often see during the winter storm season are heavy winds, strong winds, heavy rain, king tide flooding, all very typical during our storm season. And of course, our extreme weather is changing in nature as we've all recently found out. These are typical headlines from 2021. We experienced the heat dome, pineapple express, water spout. We are having a new normal in British Columbia. Flooding is another hazard. We were fortunate to not experience the devastation that the valley experienced in November, but this was during the November rainstorms. This is the Seymour River in North Vancouver. And this is Ambleside in West Vancouver in January of 22. This took place during what we call the king tide, which is the year's highest tide. And when that's combined with high winds, it can often result in flooding, as you see here. This is flooding in Lynn Valley in 2014. This was a bad day for the old Argyle secondary school. And landslides, of course, another hazard, particularly in the winter when our soils are heavily saturated with the rains. Windstorms, very typical. This is a tree through a home in West Vancouver. And of course, structure fires. North Shore certainly has their fair share of them, whether they are commercial or residential. In the residential situations, residents get that dreaded knock in the middle of the night where they may have to evacuate with very little notice. In this particular case, this was the Masonic Temple on Lonsdale in March of 2021. And forest fires. With the longer, drier summers, our West Coast forests are starting to behave more like interior forests with the stress. And there has been a greater threat of forest fire on the coast. So this was White Lake in West Vancouver. The pandemic, I don't think I need to say anything more about that. And of course, earthquake. Now, thankfully, this is not a photograph from British Columbia. This was taken in New Zealand during the earthquake of 2011. Although as we are about to explore in more detail, we are certainly at risk of earthquakes on the West Coast. So when we understand what risks and hazards we're preparing for, we can more properly and accurately prepare. The North Shore has a top 10 set of hazards. There are actually 56 hazards on the North Shore, but these are our top 10. Earthquake, wildfire, floods, landslides, structure fire, disease outbreak, severe weather, power outage, dangerous goods or industrial accidents and gas leaks. So unfortunately disasters happen without warning and the time to prepare for them is now and not while they're happening. Now, I don't always include this slide, but this was something that was not on our list of hazards, which is tsunami. And the reason that it is not in our top 10 is the lower mainland of Vancouver is in zone E at the bottom of your screen. The lower right, that dark shaded area tucked in under the shelter of Vancouver Island. So as a general rule, we are not prone to tsunamis. We might experience tidal surges, heavy movement of water. We would certainly want to be staying away from the water line, but the threat is not the same as it is in other coastal areas of British Columbia. But I do want to spend some more time talking about this hazard earthquake. It does tend to make us a little nervous here on the BC coast. We live in what's called the Ring of Fire, which is a horseshoe shaped string of volcanoes and sites of seismic activity around the edges of the Pacific Ocean. We are in North America in the upper right of your screen. Roughly 90% of all earthquakes occur on the Ring of Fire and 75% of all active volcanoes are on the Ring of Fire. So why is there so much activity in this area? We'll have a really 101 geography lesson. Think of the Earth's surface as being a cracked eggshell, and the different pieces of that eggshell are the tectonic plates, and they are in movement all the time. They move at about the rate that our fingernails grow, so maybe five to six centimeters a year. When they bump up against each other, that's when we have this release of energy in the form of earthquakes. In the Ring of Fire, you have the Pacific Plate bumping up against all of the plates around it, making it such a highly seismic area. We move into a little closer geographically to where we are. You can see Vancouver Island in the center of your screen, and you that red swoopy line that's coming from the center of the screen down to the bottom. That red line represents something called the Cascadia subduction zone, which is the most seismically active area of Canada. About a thousand earthquakes a year happen in the Cascadia subduction zone, although most are not not felt by us. What's happening in this Cascadia subduction zone? Well, we have the Wanda Fuca Plate to the left of that red line, and the North American Plate where we live to the right of that line. And those two plates are moving towards each other, the Wanda Fuca Plate being subducted under the North American Plate. Both of those plates are currently locked in friction, and scientists tell us that a significant quake, a quake, the big one as they call it, a megathrust earthquake, takes place about every three to 500 years along that Cascadia subduction zone line. When was the last one you're wondering? 1700. So we are 322 years into it. Unfortunately, an even bigger threat are what we call crustal earthquakes. These are along cracks or fault lines much closer to the Earth's surface, and we know that they fall underneath some of our heavily populated urban areas. Scientists tell us that it's not a matter of if, but when. And then moving in even closer, I just pulled this image off of Natural Resources Canada website today. This shows us the number and magnitude of earthquakes that have happened in our geographic area and we're looking again at Vancouver Island in the center of our screen. The number of earthquakes that have happened in the last 30 days. So for anybody who's doing the math, looking at that small chart at the bottom, 91 earthquakes in the last 30 days. And again, if we look at the summary chart, 52 of them were less than a magnitude of two, 16 of them were at a magnitude of two, 22 at a magnitude of three, and so on. This is very typical. It's not unusual. I think it's something that a lot of us aren't aware of though is how seismically active the area is every day of the year. And last one, I promise. This is that same area for the last year. And again, for those sharp minds who are adding up the line across the bottom that's 1000 and 10 earthquakes. It's very typical. People tend to refer to us having about 1000 earthquakes a year in this particular area. So getting back to the concept of when we understand understand a hazard we can better prepare for it. We know we live in a seismically active area. Scientists tell us it's not a matter of if but when they say there's about a 12% chance of the big one happening within the next 50 years. So how can we best prepare for this? Well, the number one thing is our drop cover and hold on earthquake drill. This is the standard safety earthquake drill. If you have children in the school system, they are doing this a minimum of three times every year. What we are trying to do is create that muscle memory because our natural instinct is to flee. That's what you see in the movies, right the dogs racing down the street. Everybody wants to run when they start to feel the earth shake and that is absolutely the wrong thing to do. You want to drop immediately where you are before the force of the earthquake knocks you off your feet. Take cover if possible under a heavy piece of furniture. If not up against an interior wall that is not underneath the window. If you are able to go under a heavy piece of furniture you would hang on hold on a magnitude eight or nine earthquake would have shaking possibly up to five minutes you want that furniture to move with you, rather than against you. If you are where you are, you do not want to be fleeing from the inside to the outside if you're in your bed, put your pillow over your head pull the covers up and ride it out. If you are outside drop to where you are. If you're driving in a vehicle pull over immediately wait out the shaking in your vehicle. The most important thing though you're trying to protect your internal organs from anything that might be falling from above. Our biggest worry in British Columbia is not so much the collapse of buildings, but from things being loosened from above light fixtures ceiling tiles, anything that might dislodge from above and become a bit of a flying projectile. So, don't flee the majority of injuries take place by people who are trying to move from inside to outside. And I'll demonstrate that here's a building from New Zealand, you can see the amount of rubble that is around the facade of this building. It's a brick of course in British Columbia but we certainly have a lot of glass in the lower mainland so do not run from the inside to the outside, drop where you are, protect your internal organs, huddle up against an interior wall, as I mentioned ideally not underneath the window which might break. A reminder that every year in the third Thursday of October we have a huge mass exercise we had over a million people registered for this last year in British Columbia it's called Shake Out and it always takes place, as I said the third Thursday of October. I encourage you to register for Shake Out at shakeoutbc.ca and you'll receive some really great informative literature throughout the year, and then of course reminders as that day approaches to join in the world's largest earthquake drill. All right, so let's moving into we've talked about our hazards, let's talk about how to make a plan. So your emergency plan is basically the playbook for how you or your household will respond to a disaster. When you know what you do and you have a nice plan laid out it will certainly reduce your anxiety and help keep you focused and safe. I'm sorry we're not meeting in person if we were I could hand you the household plan for you to fill out, but the next best thing is to go to prepared BC, you can Google prepared BC emergency plan and it will take you to the provincial site prepared BC and they have a wonderful household emergency plan that you can either fill in online and print or download and print fill out at your leisure so I would really encourage you to do that so that you can write things down and it will guide you through the types of things that I'm going to guide you through for the next few slides. The first thing you want to do with your plan is understand how will you communicate during an emergency so you absolutely want to ensure that in your phone you have contacts for someone or several people who live nearby who may be able to assist perhaps you are trapped on the wrong side of one of our North Shore bridges and you need a child picked up or a dog looked after make sure you know someone in your neighborhood or a friend who can help. You also want to have what we call an out of area contact someone who is living far far away from the site of the possible emergency incident and by far away I mean at a minimum a different time zone and even living in another country is is fine. Now our phones may not work in the way that we want them to the cell towers may be damaged or overloaded we may not be able to communicate with people in our community. We have found through emergencies around the world. If you can't communicate with someone within your community, you might still be able to communicate with someone who lives well away from the area of disaster so I'll just tell you about my out of area contact my sister Kathy in Toronto is my contact. If something were to happen and I wasn't able to communicate with any members of my family, even if they were living, you know, right next door. I still might be able to communicate with her and she may have heard from other members of my family as well so essentially she becomes a mission control, who can communicate individually with each of us when we can't communicate with each other. So pick your out of area contact, make sure they know that they are your out of area contact and make sure all your family members know who that person is it might really help in being able to communicate when we can't communicate with each other. If you're using your mobile use non voice channels, it's using less bandwidth texts will all make it eventually can't really be said the same of voice phone calls. You also want to think about creating two different meeting places. The first is quite close to home this is essentially your muster spot and I think we're also familiar with that from practicing fire drills, choose a spot close to your home. Maybe it's in the park across the street in a cul-de-sac in the parking lot. Just know where that spot is so you can all meet if you are forced to evacuate your home. The second spot is a little less straightforward and what we encourage is pick a spot outside of your neighborhood. For a number of reasons perhaps your neighborhood is unsafe because it's been flooded or there has been an industrial accident, or maybe you need a more central spot to meet because your home is off the beaten track. Maybe you live in deep cove, but you have one family member working downtown and another in Burnaby. If something were to happen and you are trying to find a place to reunite, it might not be that easy to get to a more far flung location so think about where would be a more central meeting place for you and your family to reunite in the event of something catastrophic happening like an earthquake and maybe that is a friends home or a relatives home or a community center. Everyone's scenario will be different, but it's so important to talk about this now and not after the emergency has happened when you may not be able to communicate at all using your your phone. You also want to think about where will you get your information sources during an emergency so of course North Shore Emergency Management and the three municipalities websites are great places to start checking out. For those who are following social media again North Shore Emergency Management and the municipalities and radio, of course, we're not sure which stations would be up and running first falling following a disaster but great to know where in the radio channel things such as CBC News 1130 are at a provincial level we have one primary trusted source that is called emergency info BC. You can follow it at at emergency info BC. And I'll just show you an example. Emergency info BC posts up to up to the minute information on things that have taken place emergency incidents so for example in January. There was the tsunami the volcanic eruption off of Tonga I know how quickly we forget that was only a few months ago, but I took a screenshot of what was happening on the emergency info BC website and they were indicating at this time that the tsunami had been cancelled so a lot of people aren't familiar with emergency info BC, a really valuable site of trusted source information. So breaking your plan you also want to be thinking about anyone vulnerable that you are in charge of maybe within your family someone living under your roof, roof children, seniors, anyone with disabilities. So important to create a support network that practices checking in on them. So what do we need to be practicing what, what requirements need to be met by these folks. Do they have special needs around transportation, medication communication. So important to build that support network of friends or relatives health care providers co workers, people who understand what those special needs are, and who may understand that perhaps you need help, maybe you're not able to get someone who needs your support within your house so something quite important to consider. And then the safety within your home. Our homes can be pretty dangerous places in the event of an earthquake. If you think of your home as being a ship that is rocking from side to side. What would be a danger in your house, would it be the framed glass art that is over your bed or over a couch. A really simple no cost fixes to make that could really reduce the chance of injury in your home. Another great thing that is an easy fix is securing your hot water tank to the studs in a new home that is law that it is done that way but for those of us who are not living in a new home who have a hot water tank that is freestanding in the event of an earthquake if that hot water tank goes over three bad things happen. You have lost a secondary source of water. You have probably broken your water pipe, and if it is fired by gas you have broken your gas pipe so super inexpensive and easy to secure your hot water tank. I'm just going to show you these hot water restraints that I picked up for less than $15 at one of the big box stores, Home Depot, a really cheap and easy solution to secure your hot water tank to the studs. And then just throughout your home are there heavy objects high that you could move lower and again I'm thinking about the kitchen. Often we have that covered over the top of the fridge that has those heavy vases and rejected waffle makers. Those things just become flying hazards in the event of an earthquake so move your heavy stuff down low, put your lighter stuff up high. That's sort of a great general principle to move through your home and make it a safer place in the event of an earthquake. So utilities, do you know how to shut them all off. Do you know where your gases if you have gas now this isn't something that's always within our control if we're living in an apartment or a condo complex. If it is within your control, please know where your gas valve is what that valve looks like and how to turn it off because it is a rather unusual shape and generally needs a crescent wrench to turn it off. We often encourage people to get a cheap crescent wrench silicone it into place where it needs to be to shut off that valve and leave it close by thinking about your water if your water pipe were to break. Do you know how to turn that off. And then of course your electrical panel making sure that you understand if the authorities were asking you to turn off your electricity for whatever reason do you know how to do that so really interesting things that you should know about your living area. Also in thinking about our plan we are now of course so conscious about possible future extreme heat events and other things you can do to prepare your home. We know that window awnings and shades can lower the interior temperature by about 10 degrees and ceiling air gaps to keep cool air in and possibly smoky or hot air out. We know that any green space really reduces the temperature around home so plant a tree today to have a shadier tomorrow. If you are thinking about buying supplies for the coming summer we really encourage you to stock up sooner than later. Plans, air purifiers, floppy hats, air conditioners, demand and supply issues mean that these heat beating supplies are going to be harder to find this year so if you're considering any of those things you may want to act sooner than later. This brings us to the final step which is building your kit or gathering the basic supplies so in an emergency you're going to need basic supplies, some tools, food, water stores may be inaccessible or closed or out of supplies. You want to have enough supplies to keep everyone safe and comfortable until you can leave your home and as I've mentioned this could be a minimum of 72 hours and possibly up to a week. I think a concept that not everybody is really aware of is that any event of something happening like a widespread earthquake, we really want you to be able to stay comfortable in your own home. You may not have utilities, you may not have running water or electricity, you'd essentially be fancy camping in your home but this is such a preferable option for you than going to a reception center where you would essentially have a cot that would be marked out on the floor by a four foot by eight foot piece of masking tape. We want you to stay at home, we want you to stay comfortable with your things around you and your clothing and your shelter but you will need to make sure that you have the things that you need to be comfortable food and water and some basic tools. So we're going to take a little bit of a look at a standard emergency kit and I really want to stress that this is really just a starting point. These are the basic things that you would want to have there. You would want to customize it for the needs of your family. So for example would you want to be adding diapers to that or pet food. Only you know what your family needs to be comfortable but here's some basic things we want to make sure that you've got a first aid kit. If you are someone who relies on prescription drugs for your health, you would want to have an extra round of prescription drugs and your doctor can help you work that through. Having a battery powered or hand cranked radio is really important. You can listen to a radio in your vehicle but eventually you'll run out of gas so having a battery powered radio is really important. A flashlight of course used in so many scenarios for the power outages that we get just through wind storms and certainly for a more widespread emergency event extra batteries and emergency whistle. Having all of your important documents copies of your important documents in one place is pretty critical, especially if you need to leave quickly in the event of an evacuation. We talk about cash which is so different than what we've been going through recently in the pandemic where cash has not had a lot of value and we have all been working off of plastic but if there is a widespread power outage, we will not be able to use our cards and cash will be king for those of you who are wanting to buy something that someone is selling. A phone charger of course would be great non perishable foods but I'm going to spend a little more time talking about food and water. Now we get to an interesting one in the upper right, the garbage bags and moist towelettes. Now, if your mind hasn't yet made the leap. This would be your quick and dirty sanitary situation. With quake, we know that there will be a number of broken water mains and water pipes. Chances are that they will be advising you on the radio not to flush your toilet. You would just be contaminating the ground around your home or the walls of your unit or the walls of the units around you. What we encourage people to do, if you have two toilets in your home, scoop out the water, place a garbage bag in each, dedicate one toilet for liquid waste and the other toilet for solid waste. Liquid waste can be dumped safely in green belts. The solid waste at the point in time that only you and your family know is right. You would tie that up, seal it up and put it as far away from your eating area as possible. So is that a perfect solution? No, but it would certainly get us through in a pinch. Seasonal footwear and clothing, great items to have on hand, particularly in a grab and go bag, and then the ever important water. I did want to talk a little bit more around food. So often people equate having one of these things, it's a tetrapac that often comes in in emergency kits. These are pretty fantastic in the sense that they have an expiry date of about five to seven years. It's wonderful if you're really space starved or if you're in a lifeboat or something. This is what they look like inside. Nobody ever opens them because then of course you would invalidate your long expiry date, but they're little individually wrapped cookies that look like greasy shortbread. Honestly, that's kind of what they taste like to their primarily carbohydrates, carbohydrates, fat and sugar. I would really encourage you to do a little better than that. And just simply have more things on hand in your kitchen cupboards or pantry than you might normally need for a shorter time period. This is something that if there's a silver lining that has come out of COVID, we have all learned how to have food on hand that would get us through a couple of weeks, which has been a really important concept. So foods that you would want to have extras of and just keep them in your normal rotation of eating in your household, but things of course that have a longer shelf life, minimal preparation. Ideally don't require refrigeration are familiar. If you're in a really stressful situation and all you have to eat are these you and your family are not going to be very, very happy. So examples of this type of food that I'm talking about Tetra packs of juices or milk or soup, dried foods, canned foods, whether it's meats or vegetables or fruits, pet food, of course. So lots of food items that tend to be in people's regular daily food rotation anyway but when you see things on sale just pick up a little bit more of it so that at any given time if possible, you have enough to see you and your family through a minimum of 72 hours and and possibly up to a week. Now I did want to spend a few minutes talking about water. For me, this is absolutely the most important thing. If something were to happen, and you are all safe in your home, but you turn on your tap and nothing's coming out and you have no stored water. It means you are immediately vulnerable and you are going to be doing your best to search out water sources and that may take some time to have things like that delivered to the North Shore. So I would really encourage people to have as much bottled water on hand as they are able. The recommended amount across North America is the same thing four liters per person per day. Probably thinking well I would never drink four liters of water in a day. No, but it's not just for drinking. It is for cooking. It is for hygiene. It is for the inevitable horrific cleanup that would need to take place in your house following an earthquake. It is for pets. So having four liters you would never regret having that much. We do recommend bottled water just because this is a known safe source. There are a number of different water systems out there and many of you may be familiar with them. Some people bleach water. Some people take the large thicker plastic juice jugs like you'd get cranberry juice in and they fill them and line their freezer with them. That is an option as well. Lots of different water systems but the easiest and very inexpensive is to get bottled water. I personally buy the large 22 liter bottles at a place like Costco, the kind that you would use for a water cooler. I believe they are under $3 each. For a $15 investment I am good to go for at least a couple of years. Once the expiry date passes on those water bottles and by the way the water never expires it is the vessel that it is stored in that starts to break down. But once you are well and truly past your expiry date don't throw that water out. Just relabel it as non-potable and then you've got water for hygiene and for cleanup and the fresh water that you bring in would need to be much less because it is simply for drinking and cooking. So home purification systems are not really recommended by the health authority unless you've had a lot of practice at it. It's not an exact science and bleaching your water for your family is not really the type of thing you want to start doing during an emergency. By the way, water in your hot water tank. This is a source of water for cleanup or hygiene but not necessarily for water unless it's a brand new tank. If you've ever cleaned out that four inch layer of sludge in the bottom of your hot water tank you'd understand why it's probably not a great idea to drink it. So again, just like our food supplies we're looking to have water for everyone in your household for a minimum of 72 hours and up to a week. I also wanted to talk about the grab and go bag and this is really the last thing on our list. The grab and go bag is exactly as it sounds. This is a small version of an emergency kit that you can literally grab and run out your front door in case you need to leave immediately. What did we have 56,000 people evacuated in British Columbia over the last few seasons with the fires and the floods. I'm sure a lot of those folks were wishing they had created a grab and go bag. We don't think at our best under times of extreme stress that's not the time to start thinking about what you should be packing. If you have a grab and go bag the items in there are things that you don't need to put in your household emergency kit. I personally just use an old rejected backpack from my daughter's elementary school days as my grab and go bag stuff everything in it and when we're going on a road trip I throw it into the trunk of the car and then it also serves as a car kit. So the things to have in there are really the things that again, if you needed to leave your home for a few days would keep you comfortable. So a change of seasonal clothing, a little bit of food and water, having a flashlight and a whistle first aid kit. Again medications if you're a person that relies on medication for your good health and phone charger. All of these lists of things can be found on the nscm.ca website that's nscm.ca. Quite easy to find there and also on the prepared BC provincial website so lots of great lists that you can download of things suggested items to put in your kit. So as a bit of a wrap up, we started talking about our hazards understanding the hazards that we might face here on the North Shore are extreme weather flood fire earthquake, and the importance of the earthquake exercise drop cover hold on the most important thing you can do to prepare for an earthquake and then making your plan, understanding the meeting spots for you and your household members. Supporting anyone vulnerable who might be under your charge utility shutoffs, and then home safety what hazards around your home can you reduce making your home a safer place, such as the heavy pictures that might be over your bed or over a favorite TV watching couch, moving those away to an area that has less traffic. And then finally building your kit food and the all important supplies that you might need to keep you comfortable if you were fancy camping in your home for up to a week and the grab and go bag if you get that dreaded knock in the middle of the night and need to leave in a hurry having everything in one place will will bring you a lot of a lot of ease. To leave you with a challenge, and that is to take an old pair of shoes that is destined for the garbage can or the thrift shop. The important thing is that they have some a sturdy soul on them. Stick those under your bed and make sure everyone in your family has an old pair of shoes under the bed, ideally tuck a little flashlight in there. If an earthquake were to happen in the middle of the night, and there's a 33% chance that that could happen. So you might be absolutely fine. And but then you get up and walk through your home and step on broken glass and suddenly you've gone from being resilient to requiring attention. So I don't know where you're at with your preparedness journey. A lot of us haven't done done too much yet so I'd really just encourage you to pick three actions, maybe that means getting the shoes under the bed, buying water. If it was me and I hadn't done anything yet. That would be my starting point. I'd be going to London drugs tonight and buying that water. I'd be using flashlights with extra batteries, making sure you have extra food in your pantry, establishing your out of area contact there's so many things that you can do. But again, you know, pick away at it. It's, it's not a destination, it is a journey. But what is for certain is that during an emergency is not the time to start trying to plan. So now that you have some new knowledge, you want to be able to to take action and and be resilient. I'm going to leave you with these two great resource website URLs. This is our own website and a CM dot CA, and then at the provincial level prepared BC dot CA, which is just a wonderful source of knowledge lists, the home preparedness plan, and lots of great videos that demonstrate different things that you can do to to get prepared. So that ends my formal presentation. And I think we are still in good time where we've got a bit of time for some questions. Thanks very much Jocelyn, I do have some questions coming in. And a few people have asked about whether your presentation would be available. And well, basically I've told them that we will be sending everyone a link to the presentation so they can review it numerous times but we don't have printed copies of your slide deck. Currently at the library we've got a display up for emergency preparedness week. It'll be up until Saturday, and we have a number of handouts from and send from North Shore emergency management, an alertable postcard some grab and go bag tips, as well as a household preparedness plan brochure so those are available at the library until Saturday if you want to pick some of them up. So I'll answer those two questions to start with. The next question I have is from Judy, who would like to know, would it be better to seek cover in my underground garage instead of my fifth floor apartment in case of an earthquake. I think we, none of us really know how any structure is going to respond to a particular earthquake it depends where it's located. What kind of soil it's on bedrock. I, as a, as a general rule, I think people are less comfortable in underground parking lots than they, they are up above. So I would a not recommend, recommend moving around too much during an earthquake so if you are in your apartment you would want to stay in your apartment. I do hear people like Alison Bird who's the well known seismologist for for the province who's always on the news and giving seminars and she talks about not wanting to go into her underground. When there's been a few shakes over on Vancouver Island so I would say you are wanting to stay put and get down immediately if you feel the shaking start and not be going into into the underground. Great, thank you Jocelyn. I'm not seeing any other questions at the moment so I'm just going to ask kind of one last call if anyone has any questions. And I'll wait just a moment or two for that. In the meantime while I'm waiting for that Jocelyn, I would like to say that North Shore Emergency Management has donated a door prize of a 72 hour essential emergency kit and I'm just going to grab it here and show it because it's so, it's so lovely. Here it is and it's got I'll just read the from the the kit contents there's food and water. There's a thermal blanket or rain poncho, an AM FM radio and all sorts of other great things that Jocelyn would mention that would be handy in a grab and go bag. So Jocelyn if I could have you pick a number between one and 55 as we had 55 attendees tonight. I will be contacting a lucky winner tomorrow to let them know that they won the kit and they can pick it up at the library so Jocelyn if you could pick a number for me. Let's go with 1111 so lucky 11 I will be in touch with you tomorrow I'm just making a note of that. I've got one other question from an anonymous attendee. I'm in an apartment in Westman that was built in the 1960s before earthquake code was started. What I try to get out of my building at some point once earthquake that the earthquake starts. Yes, that is before some of the, the more important code came into play which was in the mid the mid 70s. Although I don't, I don't know how that directly impacts apartment buildings but again there's, there's, it's kind of the crystal ball thing. I don't know, given an earthquake, where the epicenter is, what kind of land the apartment building is on. So many factors at play here as a general rule again you don't want to be in motion, trying to leave trying to flee a building while something is happening so I'm going to stick to my guns here and say that if you feel the earth shaking or if you feel your building moving, you would want to just drop to the ground and ride it out. We are not anticipating widespread collapse. Again, it is things that are falling from the ceiling that we are most concerned with. Thank you, Jocelyn. This is an interesting question. She's the emergency preparedness coordinator for the pack at her child's elementary school. I'm organizing our container in the moment at the moment, and would like to know if there are ways that the container should be organized. We have all of the suggested items but is there a way that they should be put in the container. Yes. Maria, I'm not sure whether you're with School District 44 or 45 or one of the private schools. What is the short answer here? If you're in the North Van School District, you can contact the occupational health and safety person, and they will have a large amount of information to give to you. So, on the parent pack site on their website with School District 45, you can also contact their HR department and they will have information that they can give you as to what goes into the container and how it should be created. And if you're with one of the private schools, they as a general rule have an emergency coordinator who also can provide you with that information. So, there is, it's a great question. There are very specific answers for that and the information is there available to you. If you're at a loss, please contact me at North Shore Emergency Management. You can just find our general number and it will get to me and I can help you out with that specifically. Thanks very much, Jocelyn. Linda would like to know where you can get a battery charger, but I'm going to guess that Best Buy, London Drugs, any of those, any of those stores would be able to assist you with that. Yes. It used to be that emergency equipment was only available in specialty stores or some online places, but honestly it's fantastically so much in the forefront now that you can buy kits and supplies at most of the big box stores, places like London Drugs, Costco Online, home hardware, sales emergency kits. I mean, really there's no shortage of, no difficulty finding these things anymore. And then of course as well there are specialty sites you can order online from several of them located in BC that are excellent. Wonderful. Thank you very much. And I'm going to go to our last question of the evening. Sorry, an anonymous attendee who says, can you speak to carpooling in the event of evacuation? Yes, I'm not really sure how to answer that question. There certainly are evacuation plans in place that your municipality has on hand. We've also just released the North Shore evacuation plan. You'll find hard copies of that in most of the community centers and in the libraries and at the North Shore Emergency Management website. There are preferred transportation routes that are recommended in the event of an evacuation. I think the reality is we all know those are going to be clogged very quickly because traffic doesn't move very well at the best of times on the road. So carpooling is certainly encouraged to try and keep the numbers of the numbers down of the vehicles that might be on the road. We also really encourage people if an evacuation is required in your neighborhood and you know someone in your neighborhood who maybe doesn't own a vehicle or requires some assistance that really encourage people to be thinking of their neighbors and those around them who might need some support during an evacuation. Thank you very much. There are a few other questions that I have to apologize to our viewers this evening that we're just not able to answer them at this time. I can see there's some specific questions and lots of general ones as well. But I would recommend coming in. We've got lots of resources at the library that talk about what you need to do to prepare and we'll answer a lot of these questions as well. So I might encourage folks to do that. On behalf of the library, I want to thank Jocelyn for this evening's presentation. For those of you who are particularly looking to other ways to prepare for emergencies, not just the ones that Jocelyn mentioned, we have another lecture tomorrow night again as part of emergency preparedness week. Tomorrow night's lecture is a fire smart program and that's actually going to be in person at the library in the Welsh Hall from 630 to 730. You can learn how to significantly decrease the fire hazards in your neighborhood and around your home. So if you're wanting to attend that, there's information on the website and you can register there. Other than that, again, thank you so much Jocelyn for this informative talk. I caught so much more the second time around as well and it reminded me of a few things. Thank you everyone for watching. Enjoy the rest of your evening and to quote the Boy Scouts, be prepared. So good night everyone.