Ask anyone you meet if they've ever had a brush with large-scale disaster, and a surprising number of them will say yes.
At the Riggers awards banquet last weekend, I started chatting with a couple whose son was on the team. They had lived for 25 years in Yellowknife (which was very interesting in itself), but the dad revealed he was originally from a little town near Hamilton, Ont. called Hagersville.
I immediately looked to my boyfriend for some sign of recognition, since he grew up in Pelham, about 40 km down the Niagara escarpment, but the name didn't ring a bell — until the man said, "That's where they had that big tire fire."
A Wikipedia search for
Hagersville reveals that the most notable thing about the place is that in 1990 a "gigantic, uncontrolled tire fire" broke out and raged for 17 days, spewing toxic smoke all over the region. Oddly enough, the fire didn't start in Hagersville; it started in nearby Townsend, but the media felt Townsend was altogether too small, unknown and unimportant to be capable of producing such a monstrous disaster, so they attributed to the fire to Hagersville.
One thing I have in common with Michelle is that we both lived for a time in Mississauga, Ontario, which usually gets absorbed into the Greater Toronto Area unless you bring up the train derailment of 1979. Then suddenly everybody knows where Mississauga is. Michelle likes to say, with some degree of pride, that the derailment happened really near her house.
I could give lots of other examples — virtually my entire extended family, who are concentrated in Montreal/eastern Ontario, suffered through the Ice Storm of 1998; a friend of mine's father lives in New Orleans and shared with us the insurance photos he took of his home after Hurricane Katrina.
My own closest brush with disaster happened while I was living in the Dominican Republic. On Oct. 28, 2007 (my 22nd birthday), a tropical depression formed over Puerto Rico and began tracking northwest. By the time it hit the south coast of the D.R., it had a name, Noel — although everyone called it "Noah" because of the devastating amounts of rain that fell during the five days the storm remained stationary over the island.
In hindsight, the storm could have been a lot worse, but at the time, it was frightening. A tree fell on the power lines in my neighborhood on the second day of the storm, knocking out electricity to the entire area, and crews could not safely get in to fix it for three days. I could still get out to the stores to buy clean water and provisions, which I cooked on my gas stove, but my drains backed up and my apartment was invaded by cockroaches and centipedes. The lack of light, especially in the evening, played on my fears as I huddled in bed with a can of aerosol insect spray, reading by candlelight.
After the storm came mudslides in the central mountains, massive crop failure in the southwest and outbreaks of disease — dengue fever and various bacterial illnesses that thrive in standing water.
As the government and military scrambled to co-ordinate helicopter evacuations for people cut off by mudslides, clear inundated roads and repair dams and bridges, relief organizations sprang into action, setting up mobile medical clinics and distributing food to the hardest-hit villages.
It was not the worst storm ever to hit the island — that distinction still belongs to Hurricane David, which killed 2,000 people in 1979. But the aftermath took months to clean up. For the most part, the islanders were left to take care of their own affairs with whatever resources they had at their disposal.
In a sense, countries like the D.R. have a natural advantage in that hurricane season is an annual event. The likelihood of one or more severe storms making landfall in that six-month window is quite high.
Still, when you live in a place day to day and fall into an unremarkable, perfectly safe routine, it becomes difficult to imagine anything disturbing it and emergency preparation takes a backseat to more immediate priorities. How else to explain the fact that even routine, fairly predictable events like hurricanes consistently take leaders and residents by surprise, with heartbreaking results?
The same is true everywhere, whether it's in a small town in Canada or a crowded city in the developing world.
Disaster can strike anywhere, at any time. Fire or flood, wind or hail, drought or accident, it doesn't discriminate — everyone is vulnerable to random devastation.
In light of the recent emergency planning exercise held by our local municipal leaders and the fact that May 3 marks the start of emergency preparedness week in Canada, take a moment to consider your response to a disaster. How would you protect yourself and your loved ones?
Whether it’s having enough food and water stashed away to sustain your household for at least three days, a little cash set aside, or a home evacuation plan, a little foresight goes a long way.
It’s natural to hope for the best, but wise to prepare for the worst.
Related:
Noel trumps the race card Everyone has role to play in emergency
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