Camp Prepare! Exercise
[A local NET and surrounding community recently tried out the Red Cross's Camp Prepare! exercise. Their accounting is below. I am keeping information about their cache confidential. ~ JVK]
We are a 37-unit, multigenerational cohousing community in NE Portland. Our Emergency Prep group saw the Facebook Red Cross announcement about Camp Prepare!
If you became stranded and unable to get to food, water or other supplies because of the influx of people in Oregon during the eclipse, could you live on only the contents of your disaster preparedness kit? What if you couldn’t access the necessities after a 9.0 Cascadia earthquake or other disaster? Test your preparedness kit and your readiness by camping out in your own backyard on the night of Saturday, August 12, for Camp Prepare!
So we decided to try it as a community. To encourage participation, we offered members a choice of scenarios: either their building is damaged and they have to camp outdoors, or they could sleep in our common hall but with no power or water, or they could stay in their apartment, also without power or running water. Over half the adults in the community signed up for at least part of the event, although some participated only in the meals.
As a community, we have stored enough emergency food to feed 50 people 1,000 calories a day for 30 days. We also are growing a lot of garden vegetables and fruit, very helpful if an emergency occurs in the summer. We have several bucket toilets, sawdust, and a plan for a humanure composting system; we placed buckets and sawdust in four locations, including a “urination station” we built several years ago. We also have first aid supplies, but they were not used in this exercise.
Our plan was to cook dinner and breakfast on our two rocket stoves in our parking lot. For dinner we cooked lentils and rice, and asked people to contribute things from their refrigerator that would go bad without electricity. So some people brought various dishes such as salads. For breakfast we made oatmeal, and served it with freshly picked blackberries, since they are abundant at this time. Everyone was required to bring their own dishes and utensils for meals.
During dinner, a member who is a very experienced camper presented information about how to clean dishes when you have no water, soap, or heat. She demonstrated this, using sand and vinegar, and that’s how we cleaned our plates after dinner.
While we were eating breakfast, we had a good discussion about the experience and what other ways we could prepare for an emergency. We had suggestions to plan a longer camp out, a winter one, and one where we actually turn off the power to our buildings, so it would be more realistic. Some of these are ideas we will need to discuss as a community. We also handed out simple prizes (emergency ponchos, waterproof matches, etc.). for turning in a "passport" we created for the event.
In the passport, participants reported what they did during the event (where they slept, what they used for power, if they used the bucket toilets, etc.) and provided feedback and suggestions for future endeavors.
This event was very timely, as we have been gathering information about tying our 1970s buildings to the foundations, and the community discussion on this topic will be starting soon. Camp Prepare! helped draw attention to the importance of this issue.