The Written Word: Rafe Mair Nov. 22nd

By Rafe Mair

   Coming out of the darkness is great fun … you find yourself praising the power company. Here they have put a stone in your shoe and when they finally remove it you’re so grateful you forget about how it got there in the first place.

Certainly we found many shortcomings in our preparation. We had an emergency kit with a flashlight and some inedible food but a flashlight doesn’t give you much light and who wants to eat pemmican?

We were fortunate that we always had access to food. We live on what’s known as the Sea-to-Sky highway which connects Vancouver to Whistler, the site of the skiing etc for the 2010 Winter games. But this road is carved out of granite and there’s no alternate road. What if we had the big earthquake we’re told is a certainty and the road was out of service?

Light and heat can be overcome with a private generator but they rely on fuel – what if the fuel runs out or the generator is damaged?

Wendy and I are re-evaluating our emergency protection system knowing that what we went through was not a big deal in the overall scheme of things.

First we need lots of bottled water – ours was OK because Lions Bay has its own water system but Vancouver is still boiling their water. And our system could, of course, be damaged.

We must have plenty of decent food; or as decent as such food becomes.

We will look into a generator but in the meantime we’ll get several gas lamps and coal oil lamps, the type you remember as a kid when out camping. We will get a decent propane stove, even though I’m leery of propane. If we opt against a generator we’ll buy a propane heater – maybe two of them.

We have two phones into our home, one for the family and one for my office. The one for my office is cordless and without power your communication is gone. For sure we’ll find some way to get back up for the computers which are our lifelines.

Lions Bay, serendipitously, set up an essential services committee connected to the Provincial emergency system a few weeks ago and this was a huge help.

We will no doubt add to this list. But as I said, this emergency that had us without power for nearly 6 days taught us that if a real emergency were to happen, we would have been dangerously unprepared.

How prepared are you?

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