Being Emergency Ready
This booklet was delivered to my house this week. It is also available to download here. It is from a Department that I didn’t know existed called the Office of Emergency Planning (“An Oifig Pleanála Éigeandála” as Gaeilge). This Goverment does seem to be good at creating emergencies, but I hadn’t realised until now that they were planned.
Here is the intro…
From storms and power cuts to flooding and health emergencies, Ireland can experience a range of emergencies. Planning ahead and taking simple steps can help reduce disruption.
Find out how you and your household can prepare as part of the Be Emergency Ready campaign.
I suppose the advice in it is sensible, as far as it goes, but the sorts of emergency it lists are very difficult to be ready for. For example, under “Food” it says “Keep a supply of non-perishable food on hand”. It doesn’t give examples, incidentally, but presumably a list could include dried pasta, rice, noodles, breakfast cereals, canned goods (soups, tinned tuna, baked beans, etc), preservatives (jam, marmalade, etc) and and tea andcoffee, jam. I suppose you should also have dried milk or UHT milk (if you can stand it), though Oat milk does keep for a long time on the shelf. The problem is that many of these are useless if you don’t have a power supply to your cooker, kettle, microwave or other cooking equipment. I have lost power in my house many times since I moved here, although never for more than 24 hours.
Lack of water might also make cooking tricky. Talking of which, the hosepipe ban in Ireland which began in August has now been lifted. This morning, to celebrate, Uisce Éireann switched off the water supply to my house (which it has done several times over the last month). This is to carry out “essential works” to replace pipes, etc. I understand the need for these, of course. I have signed up to receive SMS alerts when disruption is expected but the actual disruption rarely happens on the date referred to in the alert, which is worse than useless. Today, however, it was on the right day.
Anyway, under “light and heat” it doesn’t mention using candles, a stock of which I do keep in the house. I learned this lesson during the Three-Day Week in 1974.
No power also means no internet access so perhaps I should prepare an emergency blog post to put up in case of emergency? Other than that, following the booklet’s advice to “Make a Plan”, I propose to stay in bed and sleep until the calamity is over, if necessary for weeks, if necessary alone.
Now back to the real emergency: teaching starts on Monday and I can’t get my Moodle page to work!
In the Dark 
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