Be Prepared...

Mostly because I thought of the title and the picture to go with it. However we do need to be getting along with our tour of emergency preparedness so I suppose we'll take a look at planning. As was brought up in stake conference today, or maybe it was last night, in an emergency you either can or you can't, you either know CPR or you don't etc. So planning, you need to know what you and your family are going to do in an emergency. Elder Packer spoke last night about being in Spain as a mission president when 9/11 happened It was interesting to hear a rememberance of that day from outside the states, and how other people were impacted. Elder Packer said that they were at a zone conference when they found out about the events taking palce in New York and they were able to get the missionairies all together and tell them what had happened and how to act. He said that one missionairy asked if he'd spoken to the prophet to find out what they should be doing, Elder Packer told him that he had not, but that as part of his training as a mission president he had been told what to do in an emergency situation. Elder Packer went on to say that even if he had tried to call the prophet to find what he should do, he wouldn't have been able to get through with everyone trying to call and make sure people they knew were all right. It could have been very bad to have a group of missionaires and not to have know what to do with them all in an emergency, but because they had a plan they were all right.
We need to have plans in place and well known, I imagine that most families have a plan for what should happen if there's a fire, things like how to exit and where to meet up and call for help. Planning for a fire is all well and good, but more than that we need to have plans in place to cover every conceivable thing. To make plans consider things like:
Going through your daily routine(s), who is where when? what if someone is not with the rest of the family?
Make meeting spots
Have contact relatives/friends, someone who doesn't live in the same area if something major occurs
What happens if you or your spouse is at work?
Do you have pets? What happens to them?
Does anyone take any medications?
Where are your important papers kept?
Do you know where to go to get help?
Does your community have an emergency plan?
There are resources you can go to such as http://www.ready.gov/, with resources especially for planning. This site has instructions for specific disasters.
Oh, I will just add, that we need to have this information in some form of text copy as the internet will likely not be at our disposal in an emergency. If you're interested in finding more about all of this just start googling these things and you'll have tons of sites at your disposal. I also wanted to add this that I just found, even though I already did food storage.
Remember, we need to prepare now.