Natural disasters have the potential to claim a huge number of lives every year. Our kids are no exception. When we think of protecting our children’s futures, often times our thoughts don’t go beyond their financial needs like a college fund but neglect to train them on one major thing—Emergency Preparedness for Kids.

I get it, we don’t want to think of our kids being caught up in a disaster or another major incident. Some of us suffer from Normalcy Bias and simply don’t believe something terrible could happen in our world.

As I write this, my area is experiencing a tornado outbreak. Friends are asking me what should they tell their kids who are at home or school. I was asked why am I not freaking out with regard to my kids. Don’t get me wrong, I am concerned but know they’re doing what they have to do to survive a tornado.

How do I know this, easy we have hazard alert radio at home, when it goes off they go into action. They listen to the threat and go through a well-rehearsed drill. The only thing I need to do is check-in and see if they’ve done it.

They are kids after all.

There are various benefits of training children about emergency training ahead of time. Children are the most affected in case of a catastrophe. Most of them become anxious at the time of the emergency.

Training your child ahead of time can help ease the anxiousness in a disaster situation. As an example, I checked in on my brother’s family specifically a niece who was at home by herself during the storm. My brother reports when he got home he found his little girl in the basement, in their pre-planned tornado area armed with a lantern, blanket, snacks, and doing her homework.

This kind of automatic action is why we must prepare our children for disaster. For them and our piece of mind

1-Preparing Your Children For Disaster Can Reduce Fear & Anxiety

Teaching and training children on disaster preparedness help to reduce anxiety and worries that come along with any major incident or disaster. The lessons that children get today can save their lives today or even if something goes down in the future. Children can be educated and offered easy steps with engaging activities that help them raise awareness of disaster.

2-Preparing Your Children For Disaster Can Reduce Panic

Since children are the most affected by a disaster, preparing them in advance reduces panic and helps them know how to contact themselves to remain safe. By knowing where, when and who to stay with, children can be safe in the event of an emergency. The Pillowcase Project is an education program designed for children aged 3-5 years. It is meant to teach them about personal and family disaster preparedness.

3-Preparing Your Children For Disaster Can Help Them Not Minimize The Danger

Children that have experienced natural disasters behave differently from those that have not. It helps to rid misunderstandings about disasters and become aware. Additionally, children prepping also equip children with the skills that can make them provide help in case of an emergency. Children who are well-prepared understand how to utilize the available resources to curb.

Through children prepping, you can make them calm and rational in case tragedy strikes. Their chances of survival are high when they are well prepared. Therefore, we should encourage children to prep at all costs. Disasters surround us, and we never know when they will rap. Preparing for it does not mean that it is the end of the world but coping with real-life challenges. Start prepping today.

How have you prepared your children from a possible disaster?  When will you start? Do you know how to start?

The answer is simple, start where you are today! Start by checking out some of the great resources below.

Sesame Street-Let’s Get Ready

You are one of the special grown-ups with whom children feel most comfortable. This gives you a unique opportunity to help them learn about emergencies in a calm and reassuring environment. Sesame Street created the Educator Guide to help you prepare your children for emergencies with activities that can complement school safety drills. You can find an additional Community Guide. Click here To See More…

Prepping With Kids

The number one rule of prep club is “don’t talk about prep club!” It’s often difficult for children to keep secrets, but you must
either keep your prepping totally private from your young kids or emphasize the importance of keeping quiet as though your
child’s life depends on it. See More Here…

8 Smart Ways to Teach Kids about Survival and Prepping

Prepping is essential to all individuals, particularly young children. Your kid’s innocence makes them particularly susceptible in becoming victims of disasters of all sorts. Ultimately, they’ll depend on you for guidance and support to better equip them in surviving any catastrophe. Preparing your kids for natural disasters may be a challenging experience for you. Knowing what to teach your kids in advance is the key to succeeding in arming your children with the necessary survival skills. Read The Full Post Here…

Prepping With Kids? Mistakes To Avoid

Getting your kids involved with your prepping plans is tough. When they’re small, there isn’t much that they can do to be of help. When they get older, they have friends and a social life and a sense of immortality that make it hard for them to comprehend that life may change in an instant.Teaching them to prepare for disaster involves tact and patience. Here are a few common mistakes to avoid when helping your kids to prep. Read More…

Prepping With Children-Managing Expectations

So what do I mean by managing expectations? Children (and some adults) don’t do well with the unknown. They have active imaginations and will fill in the blanks with their own version of what’s coming up. Because they don’t have the life experience of adults, their imaginations can go wild with all sorts of ideas.  See The Whole Article…

Additional Emergency Preparedness For Kids Resources 

Caring For Children In A Disaster-CDC

Emergency Prep Kit-Sesame Street

Ready Kids-Ready.Gov

Youth Preparedness-American Red Cross

What Is Normalcy Bias?

Normalcy Bias isn’t a phrase that many people including myself hear on a daily basis. To be honest, I really haven’t heard this phrase until recently.

With all that’s be going on around the world recently,  uprisings in the Middle East, large earthquakes, and super storms,  one would think this is the reason this phrase popped into my mind. As horrible as these events are, it was an approaching ice storm, an ice storm the local meteorologists told us would be catastrophic that jump-started my mind.

I noticed people scrambling about to get ready for an ice storm that had the potential to leave us without power for several days.  Folks run here and there to get the basics supplies they should already have such as flashlights, batteries, basic food stores, and so on.  Milk, bread, and eggs flew off the shelves (I reckon folks in the Midwest like French toast when snowed in) firewood, canned goods, and snow shovels were in short supply.

Why didn’t folks have basic stuff on hand, why did they wait until nearly the last minute to get prepared?  Plain and simple too many people do not prep because they don’t believe anything can happen to disrupt their everyday life. What’s the point in prepping if you’ll never need emergency supplies

Normalcy Bias Defined

“A mental state people enter when facing a disaster. It causes people to underestimate both the possibility of a disaster occurring and its possible effects. This often results in situations where people fail to adequately prepare for a disaster, and on a larger scale, the failure of the government to include the populace in its disaster preparations.”

 

The assumption that is made in the case of the normalcy bias is that since a disaster never has occurred that it never will occur. It also results in the inability of people to cope with a disaster once it occurs. People with a normalcy bias have difficulties reacting to something they have never experienced before such as an earthquake or a tornado ripping through their neighborhood.

 

“People also tend to interpret warnings in the most optimistic way possible, seizing on any ambiguities to infer a less serious situation. Concepts such as emergency preparedness are alien to these folks”

What I get from this is normalcy bias is a process in which people despite the evidence refuse to or is unable to plan on a worst-case scenario. Prior to 9-11-01, how many people do know gave serious thought to evacuating a high-rise office building in case of an emergency?

Shortly after the September attacks, many businesses regardless of their locations came up with evacuation plans. They also came up with plans to continue business in the event of a catastrophic event. Why wasn’t this planning in place before? Simple, no one thought it could happen. Granted not many people would have thought a group of crazies would fly planes into an office building making planning for such an event unlikely.

 

 However, planning for a fire is something that should have been in place beyond a placard on a wall. No one really thought a high-rise office building could burn much less fall down, not here, not in the United States.

 

Hurricane Katrina & Normalcy Bias

A common web example of the normalcy bias is the tragedy in New Orleans following hurricane Katrina’s landfall. It is reported that many residents didn’t evacuate because they simply couldn’t envision the levees failing.

 

Folks waited until it was too late to evacuate. They found themselves stranded without the most basic of supplies.

 

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Normalcy Bias It’s All In Your Head 

The Survival Mom

Human bodies don’t normally fly through the air, and I didn’t expect a real-life lesson in normalcy bias, but last year that’s exactly what I witnessed while waiting for a red light to turn green. I was sitting in my Tahoe at an intersection not far from home when I heard the loud rumble of a truck engine. I couldn’t quite believe my eyes when a green pick-up veered around me

It’s time we plan for other worst-case scenarios now! Whether it’s a blizzard, earthquake, flood, tornado or mass casualty attack, we need to think out the possibilities and have a basic plan and supplies in place. It’s time to understand “it” CAN happen here. It’s time to be prepared not scared….Read More Here

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America Has Fallen Victim To The Normalcy Bias

Before It’s News.com

Trying to warn people to be prepared because of a probable crisis can bring you grief and frustration because of the human condition called normalcy bias. Just as people in Pompeii watched for hours as the volcano erupted without evacuation, many people do not react until it is too late. Although you may try to warn others, the reality is some people will never take preventative action even when they are starting a crisis… Read Full Post Here

Normalcy Bias and Bible Prophecy

Prophezine.com 

The normalcy bias has a strong relationship to Bible prophecy. Because we’ve never had famine, nuclear emergencies, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions on a global scale, people assume these disasters will never happen. Most of the same people believe that there is a God, yet they refuse to believe the dire predictions made by Him…. Click Here To Read The Full Post

We have conditioned ourselves to not believe a major disaster or catastrophic event could take place where we live. As an example, I live in tornado alley and notice folks refusing to believe a tornado could rip through their place with little or no warning.

As preppers, we feel we’re ready for anything. We’re ready if the lights go out, a major earthquake, or other natural disasters. We’re ready in the event a hostile force tries to take over the country. We have food, water, and other supplies at the ready. In short, we’re ready for an SHTF. Problem is, after that @#$# hits the fan, what will you do with all that crap?

Improper disposal of human waste can create a disaster itself. Local water sources can become contaminated in short order. Human waste-based diseases can decimate your camp in weeks. Diseases such as:

• Ascariasis and other soil-transmitted helminthiasis.
• Cholera.
• Clostridium difficile.
• Cryptosporidiosis.
• Enteroviruses.
• Giardiasis.
• Hepatitis A.
• Hepatitis E

After the 2010 Haiti earthquake, over 220,000 people are thought to have been killed. To add to the horror 216,000 people were infected by Cholorea. Of that number over 8,000 people succumbed to the illness.

What Is Cholera?

Cholera is an acute intestinal infection causing profuse watery diarrhea, vomiting, circulatory collapse and shock. Many infections are associated with milder diarrhea or have no symptoms at all. If left untreated, 25-50% of severe cholera cases can be fatal. A person can get cholera by drinking water or eating food contaminated with the cholera bacterium. Large epidemics are often related to fecal contamination of water supplies or street vended foods. The disease is occasionally spread through eating raw or undercooked shellfish that are naturally contaminated. Source:Centers For Disease Control & Prevention… 

“Never make coffee from water found downstream of the latrine”

Check out some of these helpful articles and use it as a way to round out your prep plan. Remember, sooner or later, that food you socked away will be transformed.

Survival Sanitation: How to Deal with Human Waste

In a SHTF situation, proper sanitation is of utmost importance if you want to keep your family from getting seriously sick. When you add to that a lack of medical facilities due to grid-down issues, staying healthy becomes even more crucial. In this series I discuss the skills you need to avoid getting and spreading disease, and how to deal with waste and trash when your town and city services are no longer working. Read More…

If the water lines are damaged or if the damage is suspected, do not flush the toilet. Avoid digging holes in the ground and using these. Untreated
raw sewage can pollute fresh groundwater supplies. It also attracts flies and promotes the spread of diseases. See More…

Dealing With Human Waste & Hygiene

As a health care professional for 30 years, and with 20 years of that being spent in the military, I brag that I am a defecation expert. You could say that I, “know my shite”. The greatest number of casualties in war is to sickness and disease. War has a nasty habit of paralyzing or removing the infrastructures of society, such as good sewage systems, regular removal of garbage, and clean drinking water. Read Entire Article…

 Emergency Sanitation

A subject often ignored in emergency preparedness or survival manuals is proper sanitation. All the planning in the world can fall apart if the members of your group become ill. After an emergency such as a flood, hurricane or earthquake, we could be faced with weeks of sanitary problems. The lack of sanitation facilities following major disaster can bring serious health risks. Proper steps must be taken to avoid post disaster illness. Flood waters may contain fecal material from overflowing sewage systems. There is always a risk of disease from eating or drinking anything contaminated with flood water. See More…

Human Waste Disposal in the Backcountry

Most hikers, backpackers, and climbers know that answering the call of nature in the backcountry can present an interesting (sometimes embarrassing) challenge. At the very least, it may cause uncertainty. What are the rules? When and where is it okay to dig? What’s this “blue bag” business? As a growing number of outdoors people head into the backcountry pondering those questions, the impacts on the landscape are growing, too. Some suggested practices are changing as human waste disposal in the great outdoors continues to have serious environmental, health, and aesthetic impacts. Read More…

Additional Resources 

• Composting Toilets on Amazon(Affiliate Link*)
• Everyone Poops
• Make Your Own Emergency Toilet
• Poop Into The Incarcerating Toilet
• Solid Waste Management In Emergencies
• The Composting Toilet Guide(Affiliate Link*)
• The Human Manure Handbook(Affiliate Link*)
• Thermophilic Composting of  Human Wastes

* I am an affiliate for Amazon. This means if you buy something I mentioned in the article, I earn a commission.   Please know that I only recommend products that I believe in. I don’t try to hide the fact I earn money from this blog, my credibility is more important than making a quick buck and putting you in harm’s way 

 Thanks for your support and feel free to post questions below. 

 For More Information Check Out My Ethics & Privacy Page

While the rest of the nation may have held their National Severe Weather Prep week, Indiana, in true Hoosier fashion is holding ours a little later by proclamation of Governor Mike Pence. This year, I am taking the time to learn how to prepare for severe weather during Indiana Severe Weather Preparedness Week, March-22, 2014, sponsored by The Indiana Department of Homeland Security.

Being prepared to act quickly could be a matter of survival. This is especially evident during the threat of severe weather. The deadliest and most destructive tornado of 2013, an EF-5 on May 20 in Moore Oklahoma and caused more than $2 billion in property damage. Even though severe weather was anticipated days in advance, many in the impacted areas said they did not have a plan and were caught unprepared. While spring tends to produce more tornadoes, they’re not uncommon in fall. On Nov. 17, a late-season tornado outbreak that struck seven Midwestern states became the most active tornado day of 2013 with a total of 74 tornadoes.

Being prepared to act quickly could be a matter of survival. This is especially evident during the threat of severe weather. The Moore Oklahoma ESF 5 tornado is estimated to have caused about $2 billion in property damage. In November 2013 alone, at least 70 tornadoes spanned seven Midwestern states.

Severe weather could happen at any time, anywhere. Even though the Oklahoma tornado outbreak was forecasted for days in advance, and warning lead times for the tornado outbreak averaged nearly 20 minutes, there were still many people in the impacted areas that stated they were unprepared.

Here is what we can do to prepare:

• Knowing your risk, taking action and being an example by sharing your knowledge and actions with
• Your social networks are just a few steps you can take to be better prepared and save your life and others.
• Know Your Risk: Hurricanes, tornadoes, storms – every state in the United States experiences severe weather.
•  Visit weather.gov to get the latest on weather threats.

Take Action:

Take the next step in severe weather preparedness by creating a family communications plan, putting an emergency kit together, keeping important papers and valuables in a safe place, and learning about Wireless Emergency Alerts. To learn more about taking action, participate in a local event on April 30 through America’s PrepareAthon.

Be an Example: Once you have taken action to prepare for severe weather, share your story with family and friends on Facebook or Twitter. Your preparedness story will inspire others to do the same. Indiana Severe Weather Preparedness Week 2014.

Learn more at www.weather.gov and www.ready.gov

Don’t forget to check us out on Facebook and Pinterest for the latest and greatest prepper news and reviews.

In the medical field, other than death, nothing is absolute. One radio interviewer told me recently he would never be comfortable about the Ebola risks until we knew absolutely everything about it and there was zero risk for everyone. Guess what. He’s never going to be comfortable.

Part of the Ebola fear fuel in America right now is the fact that we don’t know everything about this disease. And when questions arise, people come out of the woodwork with answers, whether they know what they’re talking about or not. Often, their answers boil down to: Well, we don’t know, but maybe, and if so, yikes!

Learn what we know about Ebola right now at thesurvivaldoctor.com.

Read More Sensation Free Ebola Facts-Click Here