I’m a survivor

Anyone watch 60 Minutes last night? One of the stories was about 2012 - encouraging people to be prepared. 

One guy they interviewed about the 'End Times' theory said people either believe: This can happen. That'll never happen. Or hey - when did that happen? 

Personally, I haven't made up my mind about which camp I sit in, but the story did make me feel a bit guilty.  As a parent of two young children, living on the West Coast of the South Island, I know I should be more prepared for a natural disaster.  After all, a major earthquake along the Alpine Fault could happen at any time.  Yes, we have enough food in the pantry to last a few weeks, and I occassionally remember to bottle some water, but that's about it.

So what steps have you taken to prepare your family for the unexpected??

I find the end of the world disasters a bit ridiculous. 
Our main risk is flooding and being without drinking water - this happened back in 2004 and we had been away for the weekend and had a mostly empty fridge and pantry.
We've water in the hot water cylinder.  Enough pasta and rice to last a week, plenty of meat if the power goes off.  We've got a couple of rashun packs from DH's work. I always have flour which I can use to make bread if necessary. 
We've the BBQ with a reasonaby full gas cylinder, plenty of torches and blankets. 

This issue is more if I'm not home, ie: at work or out - as last time most of the main roads into Palmy and some of Feilding were cut off.   Our home is on a hill and safe enough. The world really will have ended if the water ever gets that high.

Eftpos was down at the services station and we were without running water for 3 days. Luckily I was able to get a hot shower at DH's work - being Air Force has its benefits.
Schools and kindys were closed as a result of the water issue - it was tougher on parents having to entertain kids for a week and having to take time off work for that period.

The main consequence of natural disaster I found was being without water and power, our property wasn't directly effected. We did experience power cuts, and we were without running water for a couple of days, and the town sewage system got washed away.

Schools and kindys being closed for a week would have been the other major impact on the most people. 
With Eftpos not working either due to power failure - no money, and who carries cash these days?

Some people did get their homes flooded, Dh and his work mates had to go help out and he said the smell of dirty water going through drawers of clothes was revolting, and the smell of sticky mud.

I couldn't get to work in the 2004 floods as the roads were flooded leading into Palmerston North and parts of Feilding were closed off. I was living in Bulls at the time and couldn't get to Wanganui either, parts of Marton were flooded too.

There were people from Scotts Ferry living in the Town Hall for ages.

After watching that mocumentary they did on earthquake in Wellington, its being away from home that worrys me most. As I won't be able to reach Dh and if eftpos / atms are down won't have any money.
Most supermarkets only have milk and bread supplies for a couple of days, and most of that comes from Akl. We've had instances of trucks being unable to get throu the dessert road.
Being caught up in a natural disaster - made me realise how unprepared we were and how even minor disruptions can have a big impact.

We were living in Palmy during the 2004 floods.  I only noticed something was amiss when biking to work over the Manawatu River and seeing a huge railway container floating downstream .  Freaky how such a relatively small amount of rain could cause so much flooding (we regularly experience worse rainfall on the West Coast).  It was eye-opening seeing how unprepared and disorganised people were .... DH worked on the local radio station and had to try to sift through conflicting reports from Civil Defence/Council/Police etc as to which roads were open or closed etc. 

Bobbie, it sounds like you're well prepared .  Must check out the Civil Defence website and start getting organised.  We live pretty much at sea level too.

Peanut - that's a good point about who would collect the kids.  Do you have a back-up plan just in case you can't get to them for some reason?

Hey, does anyone own one of those wind-up torches that doesn't require batteries?  That's something I've been meaning to buy for a long time ...

I was living in Feilding with my parents during the 2004 floods. We were lucky in that we have always done a lot of camping so had a heap of things stocked up for that, we did get off fairly lightly, the garage and two rooms off the garage were flooded, but we had no running water or power for a long time. My parents have a generator though so that kept us going, along with the BBQ and we showered at family friends for the week. We lived on one of the main roads into Feilding and was heaps of fun seeing army trucks, fire trucks and CD vehicles driving through the river.

The only thing that we ended up needing was water. Was interesting when we could eventually get into town and seeing all the stocks that weren't in the stores, bread, milk and water.

We don't have any plan for if something like this were to happen, we do have a few odd bits and pieces around from camping that we could use, but yeah things like water we would need to stock up on