Best Results Organizing

Regular readers of Paper Doll know that if there’s a quirky metaphor or silly reference to be made, this is where it will happen. But sometimes, there are organizing-related subjects into which levity really can’t be injected. This is one of those posts.

September is National Preparedness Month.  We’ve just observed the 7th anniversary of 9/11 and the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, and our friends from Florida to Texas have seen their homes and communities ravaged by this year’s storms, including Gustav, Hannah and Ike.

Of course, storms and floods, earthquakes and wildfires, and all manner of natural and man-made disasters occur year round.  But September is a time of change, second only to early January, when people not only head back to school literally, but start on paths to self-improvement…to get in the habit of getting into habits, to get organized, to prepare.  National Preparedness Month is our grown-up opportunity to head back-to-school and rack up some essential credits.

The federal government’s Ready.gov is a great place to start to learn about disaster preparedness.  In addition to checklists in a variety of formats, they have videos for helping special audiences (seniors, families with pets, people with disabilities, etc.).  Their top three recommendations are:

1)  Create an Emergency Kit.

Start with Ready.gov’s officially recommended and additional kit supply suggestions, but depending on your family or work situation, you might also review additional options for emergency resources and your “grab-and-go” 72-hour kit.

Even after you’ve checked all the official lists and considered the retail options, brainstorm with friends and peruse the web to make sure you’ve covered the reasonable contingencies.  The point isn’t to carry your house on your back, but trigger important but easily-forgotten items. 

You may need items to smooth an evacuation, but you’re more likely to need supplies for staying safely in your home, such as when you ride out a blizzard.  To start, inventory your emergency tools and supplies and ask these questions:

• Do your smoke & carbon monoxide detectors have fresh batteries? 
• Do you have crank-operated flashlights or combination crank-operated flashlight/radios that will allow you to get see where you’re doing and obtain weather updates even if the electricity is out and the batteries have all run down?
• Have you checked levels and the expiration date on your kitchen fire extinguisher?  (Do you even HAVE a kitchen fire extinguisher?)
• Are your home, car and office first aid kits fully stocked?
• Do you have LOTS of bottled water?
• Do you know how to disinfect water if you are unable to boil it?

2)  Develop an Emergency Plan for Getting Out and/or Away.

Start with the government’s suggestions to help you create your own plan from scratch, or use pre-created emergency planning books.  Either way, develop your emergency plan now rather than later.  Once you make your checklists (for what you need, whom to call, where to go and how to get there), maintain multiple copies in various locales, including your glove compartment, the desk drawer at your office and within easy reach of major household exits.  Teens and older kids can keep copies in their lockers or backpacks; elementary school kids should have emergency contact cards.

Practice fire drills and escape routes in your home and office, and don’t just talk about it, but walk through the route. Identify a meeting point outside, away from the danger and be sure to designate someone to count heads.  Mention your escape routes to overnight guests in your home.

Develop an evacuation plan, with contingency options, for driving your family out of town, and know your community’s civil defense procedures to ensure your plan doesn’t contravene the official route.  Make sure your long-distance communications point-person knows the route in case your family gets separated and calls in. 

Plan communications alternatives if family or co-workers are far-flung or traveling. Funnel updates to your long-distance point-person.

(And at the risk of Paper Doll sounding like a Luddite, please make sure you have an old-fashioned, no-electricity-needed, landline phone.  More and more consumers, particularly the under-30 set, are discarding landlines for all-cell, all-computer communications, but when cell towers are down and wireless gets wiggy, landlines are an important alternative…and the phones don’t need to be charged.)

3)  Be Informed.

In general, Ready.gov urges us all to be as informed as possible regarding what disasters may be coming our way, and to know as much as we can about the emergency plans available at every level:  family, school, office, community, etc.

Next, know what kinds of disasters might happen in your area.  It might be obvious for a newcomer to California to read up on Earthquakes, but other situations might be a surprise.  If your new community is far from a river or ocean but experienced surprisingly heavy snowfalls, warm Spring rains could bring flooding.  Also, know how your community prepares.  As a native of Buffalo, NY, the first “incapacitating” snowfall I experienced in Tennessee ranked up there with a typical Tuesday in my hometown, but I quickly learned that unlike Buffalo, my new home was not prepared to deploy hundreds of snow plows and salt trucks.

Other ways to get involved include reading some in-depth expert advice, including:

Organize For Disaster, by Judith Kolberg, is an excellent sourcebook to help you plan your disaster preparedness tasks, including taking you step-by-step through what you have to know (emergency contact information, passwords and codes, shut-off and lock-down procedures, etc.), establish (safe rooms, fire drills and evacuation routes, communication plans), store and protect.

Homeland Security’s 30 Tips for Emergency Preparedness is also full of good advice and checklists.

If planning get to be overwhelming, share and delegate.  Assign individual family members read specific chapters, tips or checklists to and complete associated tasks; middle-schoolers, in particular, love to have an opportunity to show responsibility.  Then, together as a household, review everyone’s progress. In office settings, assign tasks and cross-train.

In addition to the three elements of the official approach, above, Paper Doll is always thinking about the paper side of things:

4)  Like A Good Neighbor…You’re in Good Hands:  Let’s Talk Insurance

• Do you have homeowner’s or renter’s insurance?
• Is your insurance policy up-to-date?
• Is your coverage equal to your recovery needs?  Do you have replacement-value coverage?  Do you know that replacement value is not the same as market value?  Replacement value means insurance will provide funds equal to the pre-loss value, not the original value, of an item.
• Have you included insurance rider for any recently-acquired big-ticket items (including jewelry, high-end computers and electronics, etc.)?
• Do you have a sewage backup rider?  If your sump pump fails, things can get ugly…quickly!
• Do you have flood insurance?  This can only be purchased from the National Flood Insurance Program and is not part of homeowner’s or renter’s insurance.  Gauge your risk and get a price quote.

5)  Build An Emergency Fund

Emergency funds are called that for a reason.  If your home were destroyed, structurally unsafe or even merely inaccessible for weeks or months, would you have somewhere to stay and financial resources to acquire the essentials, like food, clothing, or medicine?  What if your place of employment were destroyed or otherwise had to shut down, even temporarily?

Financial advisors suggest you maintain a liquid account with three-to-six months’ worth of living expenses.  If you don’t have these (or any) funds set aside, start now, and continue every week thereafter.  If possible, have a set amount of your paycheck directly deposited into your emergency fund, or arrange to have money automatically transferred from your primary account a few days after your paycheck normally arrives.

6)  Practice Your Five-Minute Warning

What if you had only five minutes to rescue possessions from home or work?

Your emergency plan will help you safely evacuate your family and make sure you have the absolute essentials.  But what about items of sentimental value, non-tangibles like vital information, or other things the insurance company can’t ever replace?  What could you safely gather and take with you if you had only minutes to depart?

Does the clutter in your home or office make this exercise depressing?  If you aren’t yet sufficiently organized so that you can lay your hands on these items, let some healthy fear be your cue.  Start decluttering and store essentials where they’ll be easily reachable.  Safely and sanely organize according to these three “H” categories:

Head

• Collect and maintain your VIPs (Very Important Papers).
• Isolate financial records, PIN #s and passwords, insurance policies with agent phone numbers, and computer back-up disks. (You DO back up, right?)
• Remember legal documents like birth certificates, passports, mortgage papers, and licenses to help you recoup post-emergency.  Maintain these items and your safe deposit box key in a portable fireproof safe if you have to evacuate.

Health

• Maintain a list of all prescriptions, including dosages, that each family member takes. Maintain a back-up supply of medicines you might need immediately, particularly for allergies, asthma, diabetes and heart conditions.
• Don’t forget occasionally-used items like Epi-pens.
• Keep a copy of your eyeglass prescriptions.  If you get evacuated to hundreds of miles from home, chances are your ophthalmologist’s office and Joe’s House of Glasses will be closed and they’ll be gone, too.  Post-emergency, you’ll have lots of insurance paperwork to read, so be prepared.

Heart

• In an evacuation, you can’t bring all of your family photos and scrapbooks.  But do make sure each of you has one recent photo of every family member in case your family becomes separated.
• Start identifying, copying and/or digitizing photos have so much sentimental value that you’d miss them long after the emergency is over.

Finally, if you think you know everything about getting organized to prepare for and recover from an emergency, check out your Readiness Quotient.

Let’s be careful out there.